Follow up: Calories in Legoland Apple Fries

Legoland Apple Fries are a tasty treat that I reviewed for a post here on paper blag in May 2011. The question everyone seems to ask is: How many calories are in them? Are they at all healthy? is a close second.

Of course, anything fried isn’t REALLY healthy. However, Legoland has taken a few measures to make this decadent dessert healthier than you might at first think. Their apple fries are gluten free, nut free, and have zero grams of trans fats. They are also listed as a dairy free option, but that disturbs me a little. I hope they mean that it is dairy free if you pass on the vanilla cream!

Legoland is pretty hush hush about their exact recipe, but I did find an approximation of it online. Chef Jason Hill will even show you how to make them on YouTube and San Diego’s own Union-Tribune printed Hill’s recipe in 2008.

I ran Chef Hill’s recipe through SparkPeople’s Free Recipe Calculator and found out that one serving contains a whopping 943 calories with 27.2g of fat and 93.5g of sugar. However, I would like to point out that Chef Hill’s recipe doesn’t contain any vanilla and that the Legoland cream topping seemed lighter than whipped cream cheese and marshmallow cream. If I substitute 2 TBSP of French Vanilla Cool Whip for Hill’s whipped cream cheese and marshmallow cream, the calories drop to 543 with 30g of fat and 68g of sugar. So the big question is, what is in the Legoland whipped topping?

The bottom line is: Yes, there is a whole apple in there; but NO, that DOES NOT make it healthy or low in calories.