The Bake Shop Series is a collection of all-new, creative-format protein snacks from the legend itself, Quest Nutrition. In more recent years, the brand has added a host of other items to go alongside its original hit, the Quest Protein Bar, and they have delivered time and time again. The Quest Candy Series is a bag of deliciously sweet candy-like experiences, the Quest Protein Shake gives you a milkshake experience with protein powder macros, and now, in Bake Shop, it has recreated classic baked treats.
To start, Quest Nutrition’s Bake Shop Series consists of Quest Brownies and Quest Muffins, both providing 10g of protein per piece, a gram or less of sugar, and just 2g of net carbohydrates. The products keep with the brand’s consistent theme of better-for-you nutrition, including a fair amount of protein, but the big question is taste. Quest has never had trouble delivering on taste and texture in its various functional foods, although here in the Bake Shop, we have some very different formats and expected consistencies.
Review
Of the two Quest Nutrition Bake Shop creations, the Quest Brownies is the better of the two, as it is easily the closest to the real thing. It has a dense and decadent texture to it, not as heavy as a brownie, which makes sense as it has only 190 calories a piece, but enough to give you that blindfolded feeling of an actual brownie. The rich chocolate taste is in there, albeit somewhat subtle in sweetness; however, that ticks up when you hit the chocolate chips scattered throughout, adding more to the taste and texture.
As for the Quest Muffins, the functional food innovator walks a fine line between doughy and muffin-like and dry and chewy. The more you eat and get used to the specific consistency of the Bake Shop innovation, the more enjoyable it becomes; in fact, it’s almost like the less of the outer layer you get, the softer and muffinesque it is. We grabbed the Chocolate Chip flavor, and while the chips do add to the experience, they don’t have enough chocolate sweetness or moisture to stand out over everything else you get in a bite, although that’s not a negative as the fluffy build of a muffin traditionally makes up most of the food.
Summary
Overall, Quest Nutrition has made a damn good effort in both of the Bake Shop Series products, and it is important to note brownies and muffins are not common formats. There are a lot of brownies out there; however, this one is not made with a lot of collagen; Quest Brownies get all of their protein from micellar casein, whey isolate and concentrate, and calcium caseinate. With that aside, Quest has really gone in deep, entering a territory and formats it hadn’t really touched, and done it better than probably anyone else.
We’ve had a good amount of better-for-you brownies and muffins, mostly in the United Kingdom and Europe, and they’re mostly doughy reshaped protein bars, where you get protein bar consistency squished into the shape of a brownie or muffin, or they crumble the minute you open them. Quest Nutrition has really started its Bake Shop Series with a bang thanks to its nutrition, and whether or not it was its goal, it hits familiar tastes and textures from traditional brownies and muffins, and impressively doing it with 10g of protein, 2g of net carbohydrates, about a gram of sugar, and 200 calories or less.
