Dianne's Fine Desserts

Dianne's Fine Desserts is a bakery you may have experienced, but not realized it before.  Although they've been around since 1976, you probably haven't heard of Dianne's Fine Desserts by name, even if you've enjoyed their products, as they distribute entirely to foodservice and wholesale customers, no consumer retail sales.

"A leading provider of premium frozen thaw-and-serve desserts to the foodservice industry, Dianne’s Fine Desserts® has been serving up inspiring, mouth-watering and memorable desserts for over 40 years. The Company’s product line includes cheesecakes, layer cakes, pies and tarts, brownies/bars, individual minis and specialty desserts; all created at two state-of-the art GFSI-certified manufacturing facilities. Dianne’s Fine Desserts has strong core markets, an established customer base and product lines that anticipate consumer demand and support customer initiatives and goals."

Their product line includes pies, cakes, tortes, cheesecakes, dessert bars, brownies, and minis.  I only tried (at least knowingly) only the minis.

Assorted Cheesecakes.

"A five flavor collection of mini cheesecakes perfectly sized and packaged for any occasion – 7 pieces each of Vanilla, Chocolate, Lemon Crème, Strawberry and Salted Caramel with Candied Hazelnuts."

Our assortment had 5 flavors, 2 caffeinated, 2 fruity, 1 plain.  I tried all but the strawberry.  The vanilla, strawberry, salted caramel, and lemon all used the same basic graham style crust, the chocolate had a chocolate one.  

Vanilla.

I started with the most simple flavor: vanilla.  Note that it is explicitly vanilla, not "classic NY" or plain or anything like that.  That said, I didn't actually taste vanilla.  It just tasted like a lightly sweet basic cheesecake, and not a particularly good one.  It was really, really dense, and not really creamy, so a letdown from the texture standpoint too.

Vanilla cheesecake base? Low 2/5.

Then there is the crumble on top, which seemed to be soft cake crumbs?  An odd thing to have on top.  It was fine I guess?

Vanilla: crust.

And then there is the "crust".  Which, really was more of a base than an actual crust.

First, I have to address the poorly constructed cheesecake aspect of it.  You may have noticed in the first vanilla cheesecake photo you didn't actually see a crust.  Because, on that side of the cheesecake, there was no crust.  Spin it around a bit, and then you get this section here, with 50%+ crust.  This is a single cheesecake, just, rotated.  So they lose points for such poor quality control.

And then they lose every other possible point for the actual execution of the crust.  It crumbled into sand moments after this photo was taken.  It tasted like sawdust.  It was truly awful on all dimensions.  Zero stars.

Lemon Crème.

And from the boring vanilla, we suddenly get very fancy.  This is not just lemon cheesecake, but a lemon *crème*.  I expected/hoped that maybe it would mean this one would be a bit more creamy?

Alas, the crème did not seem to help the texture.  Again, just very very dense.  It did have mild lemon flavor, but again the base cheesecake wasn't particularly good.  Meh.  1/5.

It had the same crumble topping and totally poorly assembled crust as the vanilla, as you can see here, this side has basically no crust.

Lemon Crème: crust.

And yes, spin it around, and you can get plenty of sawdust crust falling out immediately.

Salted Caramel.

The salted caramel had little bits of candied hazelnut on top.  They were a bit soft, but tasty enough.  

This one had a really enjoyable, sweet but not cloying, fairly developed, caramel flavor.  Hands down the most successful of the flavors.  It too was fairly dense and I didn't love the texture, and it didn't really taste like a cheesecake exactly, but, for a thick, dense, sweet bite, it was good enough.

The crust was again horrible, and poorly distributed.  

The best of the four I tried, by a lot.  Very low 3/5, as the crust was still awful, and it wasn't really what I think of as a cheesecake.

Chocolate.

The chocolate one came topped with a Oreo style crumb on top, which also seemed to be what made up the very crumbly base.  This base was slightly better than the others, but only slightly, and it still just crumbled apart immediately.

The base cheesecake was again just soo dense that it made it not enjoyable.  Mild chocolate flavor, mild cheesecake flavor.  I guess my second favorite, but I didn't really want it. 2/5.