Domino’s has always been pretty good with side items, sporting Chicken Kickers, Chicken Wings, and Cheesy Bread/Breadsticks for a few years now. They’ve also really knocked that sides menu up a notch recently (“BAM!”) with the addition of their Bread Bowl Pastas, Oven Baked Sandwiches, Salads, and their new American Legends pizzas as well. In this flurry of new products comes Domino’s new Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake. It sounds like the sort of cake you might come upon in your wildest dreams, or some sort of Candyland experiment gone right.

At first I shrugged this thing off as something I’d never really try, because on the rare occasion that I do order something from Domino’s, it’s usually not a dessert. Then they set up this package deal with their Bread Bowl Pastas where you order one and get a Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake for free with it. Now, Domino’s Bread Bowl Pastas are incredible, so this seemed like a small price to pay to receive a whole Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake, or so I thought. And then GrubGrade put up some first impressions of the item, whereupon I was fully convinced that it’d be a good idea to try this.

So I picked up a Bread Bowl Pasta and my free Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake, and the first thing I noticed was how tiny the box holding it was. The second thing I thought was “No wonder they’re giving this away free.” Upon opening the container, I found that the whole Chocolate Lava Crunch Cake was about 2.5 to 3 inches in diameter. So obviously this isn’t something you’d order by itself from Domino’s. However, when I opened up the box, a decent blast of chocolate scent wafted up and hit me in the face, a really cocoa kinda smell, which was rather enticing. I took a small bite on the outside so I wouldn’t hit the chocolava (I’ll be expecting royalties), just to get a good impression of the “cake” itself. It was actually pretty crunchy on the outside, but definitely only on the outside. As soon as you got past the outer shell, it was soft and chewy, and as Ryan stated, more like a brownie than cake. The cocoa-y scent had now become a powerful cocoa-y taste, and as I moved in toward the inside of the item, it got softer and warmer until some fantastic thick chocolate goo erupted out of the side. The Chocolate Lava was thick but still runny enough to leak out of the sides, which was a perfect consistency. The chocolate flavor was really intense and rich, and for some reason reminded me strongly of chocolate Teddy Grahams. There was surprisingly a lot of chocolate lava, too.

So even though this thing turned out to be really good, it’s still pretty small. It’d work absolutely perfectly with a cup of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream; it’s the perfect size, and the perfect flavor to compliment the chocolate. It’d actually be really cool if for another $.50 or $1 you could add ice cream to it. The price of the item itself is $1.99, which is pretty expensive considering you could pick up a container full of brownies for that price. And don’t even get me started on how not worth it it is to buy TWO for $3.99. You should get two for the current price of one. But like I said, it’s totally worth it when you get it for free with a Bread Bowl Pasta, so why not try that offer out? It runs until September 13th.