The Aldi Bakery Item You Should Leave Off Your Grocery List

When one of our intrepid Foodie feature writers sat down with a whole basket of packaged sweets to figure out the best and worst Aldi baked goods, a few things became evident. Aldi has some pretty solid bakery treats under its Bake Shop Bakery label — the frosted sugar cookies and triple chocolate creme cake were declared to be standouts — but when the brand swings and misses, it errs on the side of dryness, leading us to wonder if the maxim that you should think twice before purchasing grocery store baked goods is true. Nobody likes an arid dessert that sucks all the moisture from your mouth and tastes chalky and old, but such was our writer's experience with Aldi's cinnamon rolls. She acknowledged that all packaged sweets were bound to suffer a bit from textural issues and conceded that the Aldi rolls had a pleasant taste, but complained that the offending pastries "felt more like biting into a dried-out sponge than a cinnamon roll."

Lest you think that our writer was just being overly critical, we took a scan of what the internet had to say about the Aldi Bake Shop Bakery cinnamon rolls. There were some much more favorable reviews out there (not surprising, given the extent of the Aldi fandom) but, on Reddit, some commenters were talking smack about the rolls in a way that fully validated our original distaste.

"Just your average grocery store cinnamon rolls," the original poster of one Reddit thread declared. "Nothing special besides a good price. We would not buy it again." The icing of the cinnamon rolls took a lot of heat in particular, with several commenters dubbing it excessive and fake-tasting. "Total junk!" another reviewer on the thread opined, not mincing words. While some posters felt that the rolls were a little bit better when warmed up for a few seconds in the microwave, others felt that nothing could save these mediocre pastries. "They're just okay, in my opinion. Nothing special," another comment sniffed.

There are a lot of mistakes that can happen when baking homemade cinnamon rolls, but for many home cooks nothing compares to the real thing. With a little practice, you will just about always get the gooiest, softest, most pillowy cinnamon rolls when you mix them up yourself, let them rise, and stir up your own icing. If baking from scratch is too intimidating or convenience is what you are after, you may do better to pick up a roll of refrigerated cinnamon roll dough from the grocery store — Aldi even sells one under its Bake House Creations label — and wait a few minutes for some fresh cinnamon rolls to bake up in your oven. Ultimately, Aldi has plenty of stupendous private-label food products that we absolutely adore, but packaged cinnamon rolls simply are not the store brand's forte.