Vegan Treats at Viva Herbal Pizzeria

I know it's hard to believe for non-vegans, but delicious vegan pizza exists.  As a non-vegan, I eat it regularly instead of normal pizza.  My go-to spot is Viva.  (This spot is no secret to vegans, and in fact it has been probably 10 years since it was all the rage.)

Viva also has some good (and vegan) chocolatey desserts.  So, there is this bakery in Pennsylvania called Vegan Treats.  Prior to the giant vegan explosion of the last few years, their baked goods were THE ubiquitous vegan baked goods.  And for good reason.  

Viva has three chocolatey items from them -- brownies, cookies, and whoopie pies.  I can't really get behind the whoopie pies (or basically any whoopie pies), and the cookies are pretty good, but the brownies really shine.  They are up there with PeaceFoods and Vegan Divas for best vegan brownies in the city.

Vegan Treats are available elsewhere.  They are available a lot of elsewheres.  I don't know which of those places sell the brownies.  But do yourself a favor and give them a try -- they are delicious even if you are not vegan.

Bottom Line: One of my most-frequented establishments in NYC.

The Whoopie

If there's one thing we love here at Chocolate NYC, it's mail. Particularly mail containing chocolate. So you can imagine our joy when we received this at Chocolate NYC headquarters:

What's inside? What's inside?

This big white package, that's what!

But what is inside this big white package?

WHOOPIE PIES!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with whoopie pies, they are a popular New England baked good that basically takes a cupcake and turns it into a sandwich. This is a genius design for those of us who love cupcakes but can't eat them without getting frosting all over our noses (which is, frankly, a waste of frosting). This particular brand of whoopie pie is called The Whoopie and is created by Chococoa Baking Company, in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Here are some key facts about The Whoopie:

-It's made with organic ingredients; local, free-range eggs; and other things that are good for the environment. This is why we eat chocolate, folks: to save the environment.

-It's petite; only two inches in diameter. One of our Chocolate NYC taste testers described it as "just about enough whoopie pie." I described it as "just about enough whoopie pie" after I ate three of them in a row. But I also have a notably high tolerance for baked goods.

-It's sold at twenty-five Whole Foods Markets in NYC! So we do not even have to travel to Massachusetts to get more of these bad boys. We can get them within blocks of where we live, which is lucky, because these things are delicious, and we are lazy

The Whoopie comes in four flavors, all with chocolate cakes, but with different fillings: vanilla, espresso, and raspberry buttercream, and chocolate ganache. There are also seasonal specialty flavors. Here's how each one fared in our taste tests:

I liked the chocolate ganache one best, obviously, because it was the chocolatiest. The filling was really fantastic. Actually, almost all the fillings were top-notch, with excellent consistency. The cake was a little too dry for my tastes (not a surprise in pre-packaged baked goods), but the frosting in the middle really helped provide balance to the cakeiness.

The one filling that didn't please me was the raspberry. It tasted too artificial to me. The vanilla one, on the other hand, was particularly lovely, even rivaling the chocolate-on-chocolate whoopie. The vanilla one tasted like a classic whoopie pie of my childhood, only higher-quality and clearly doing a better job of saving the environment.

BOTTOM LINE: If you're not getting boxes of these in the mail, you should probably go to Whole Foods and buy some. And then throw a dinner party, and invite me. The Whoopie would make an excellent post-dinner party nibble.