CARAMEL APPLE POP TARTS

Just in case you didn't read my review of Hostess Caramel Apple Cupcakes, I'm going to cut and paste from the opening of that post...because it also applies here.

"Pumpkin spice is, of course, the ubiquitous flavor this time of year--gracing everything from latte and cakes to Mini Wheats cereal and English muffins.  A close second, however, is caramel apple.  Considering the fact that pumpkin spice is completely fictional, you might expect confectioners to have more success recreating the taste of caramel apple when flavoring other desserts.  Sadly, you would be wrong."

Once again, I am flabbergasted by a confectioner's inability to recreate what seems to be a simple flavor combination.  Granted, Kelloggs might not have as much experience as Hostess when it comes to caramel or apple (aside from Apple Jacks...which, now that I think of it, doesn't really taste like apple either).  Still, Kelloggs is the king when it comes to creating breakfast pastries from flavors and colors not found in nature.  How hard could it be?

Apparently, too hard.  The fake apple flavor is a little easier to taste here than it was in the cupcake, but that's not a good thing.  It still doesn't taste right.  The fake caramel taste is a little better, but seeing as how one should normally associate this taste with a substance that is thick and creamy...two adjectives which have never been used to describe a Pop Tart...it doesn't taste right either.  One doesn't have to be a mathematics major to understand that, if two great tastes taste great together, two mediocre tastes taste...well...mediocre.

Considering the large library of other Pop Tarts currently available, you would be hard pressed to find a reason to consume this one.  If you really want a caramel apple Pop Tart, your best bet is to take an un-frosted brown sugar cinnamon variety, stuff it with applesauce, and melt a handful of Kraft caramels on top of it.  (If you do so, and wind up bringing this to a school bake sale or local county fair, where it becomes the second biggest hit behind fried Twinkees, please contact me so that I can let you know where to send the royalty checks...)    

RATING:  2/5

HOSTESS CARAMEL APPLE CUPCAKES

Pumpkin spice is, of course, the ubiquitous flavor this time of year--gracing everything from latte and cakes to Mini Wheats cereal and English muffins.  A close second, however, is caramel apple.  Considering the fact that pumpkin spice is completely fictional, you might expect confectioners to have more success recreating the taste of caramel apple when flavoring other desserts.  Sadly, you would be wrong.

I'm not sure why this is the case, but Hostess seems to have had trouble reproducing both caramel and apple flavors.  It's not as if they don't have previous experience with both.  In fact, the Hostess Apple wheat flour, beef fat and high fructose corn syrup concoction...which you might otherwise know as "Hostess Apple Pie"...has been a kids' lunch staple for decades.  And they've tried, albeit unsuccessfully, bringing a sea salt caramel cupcake to market in the past.

In this case, the new cup cake doesn't taste much like caramel or like apple, which sort of defeats the purpose.  It would be like a peanut butter and grape jelly flavored sandwich that tasted like almonds and boysenberries.  Close, but no cigar.  If I had to pick one flavor that broke through, it would have to be the caramel.  But that's about as much of a victory as the winner of a boxing match between two washed-up old fighters where one falls down and breaks a hip in the first round before a punch is thrown.  So, yeah, the imitation caramel taste wins...just barely.

If you didn't read the box and weren't expecting this to taste like caramel apple, which sadly I did and was, it is a passable cupcake.  Certainly no worse than many other Hostess cupcake flavors.  But considering what this could have and should have tasted like, Hostess Caramel Apple Cupcakes are definitely a missed opportunity.

RATING:  3/5

BRUNCH FAVORITES CANDY CORN

You know you are in for something unusual from the moment you tear open the bag and are greeted with the sickly sweet smell of...uh...caramel corn?  Some sort of artificial sweetener or vanilla extract?  A candle?  Whatever it is, it is quite overpowering.

Let's start with the name: brunch favorites.  This is quite misleading, and one can be forgiven for thinking that the candy inside will taste like bacon, omelettes and mimosas.  Instead, the three flavors are French Toast and Maple Syrup, Waffles and Strawberry, and Chocolate Chip and Pancakes.  These aren't "brunch favorites" so much as they are the IHOP kids' menu.

I chose to start with the Waffles and Strawberry.  The strawberry tastes like your typical artificial strawberry that graces everything from Starburst to Frankenberry cereal, and isn't bad, but it is paired with a vague caramel/vanilla sort of flavor.  Again, not bad, but not reminiscent of waffles either.  This is a middle-of-the-road flavor.  Next, I tried to French Toast and Maple Syrup.  I'm almost positive this candy can be sold simply as maple and no one would know the difference.  There's no French Toast involved as far as my taste buds are concerned, but nevertheless this is the best flavor of the three in my opinion.  Maybe that's because I tend to smother my French toast, waffles and pancakes with maple syrup anyway.

Speaking of pancakes, I've saved the worst until last.  There is no redeeming value in artificial chocolate, especially when you can get the real thing in plenty of other candies.  Once again, the main flavor is paired with some sort of weird vanilla/caramel flavor to represent the pancake...but unlike with the other two flavors, this time it makes the whole thing worse.

So, bottom line is that there is one flavor here which is pretty good in small doses (assuming you like maple), one flavor which is merely okay, and one which is revolting.  I struggled with the appropriate rating, but eventually I returned to this thought: candy corn is its own flavor in and of itself, and Brach's really should have left that alone.

By the way, Brach's Brunch Favorites Candy Corn is exclusive to Target, so you won't find this on store shelves everywhere.  From what I've tasted, that's a good thing.

RATING: 2/5

MAPLE BACON POP TARTS

Maple Bacon is a relatively new flavor fad, but as far as I am concerned it ought to be retired immediately.  And I'm a huge bacon lover, as well as someone who enjoys maple in many forms (syrup, cookies, doughnut bars, etc.).

As these flavors are already associated with breakfast, you might think that a Pop Tart would be a perfect way to replicate them.  You would be wrong.  I'm not a big fan of bacon bits sprinkled on a maple doughnut either, but at least that can involve real food rather than imitations.  Here, you have frosting sprinkled with bacon-flavored something covering a pastry filled with maple-flavored something.  Indeed, neither bacon nor maple were listed as ingredients.

I thought that the bacon flavor was too "smokey" and overpowered whatever enjoyment I might have had of the maple flavor.  Other victims...I mean, co-workers...that I shared these with thought the opposite.  But we all agreed that these two tastes didn't work together.  Not as a Pop Tart, at least.  If you like this flavor combination, stick with drizzling syrup on your warm, crispy bacon.

RATING: 1/5

PUMPKIN SPICE HOSTESS CUPCAKES

As I grew to adulthood, I eventually realized that there was no such thing as the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or pumpkin spice.  And yet that doesn't stop all three of them from appearing like clockwork each year!

Usually the onslaught of pumpkin spice-flavored everything doesn't begin until late October or early November, so I was surprised to see these on the shelf in mid-August.  I wasn't surprised to see that these cupcakes contain no cinnamon, cloves, ginger, or nutmeg (aka "pumpkin spice"), because I expected they consisted mostly of artificial flavors.  But I was surprised to note the following small print on the back of the box: "Partially produced with genetic engineering".  Frankly, if you are eating Hostess cup cakes, you are probably not going to be concerned, but it did make me scratch my head.  But I digress...

These cupcakes taste somewhat like a spice cake mix, but not quite.  There is a slight hint of sweetness to them...possibly orange?...but they don't taste anything like the pumpkin pie pictured on the box.  Hostess missed a good opportunity to change the frosting, though.  These would have been perfect with cream cheese-flavored frosting, but alas they appear to be a more generic vanilla.

The bottom line is that fans of spice cake and pumpkin spice will enjoy them, but in a couple of months you'll instead be able to pick up a cream cheese frosted spice cupcake along with your latte, so you might as well wait.  Good, but not great.

RATING: 3/5

BLUE RASPBERRY POP TARTS

Despite my current fascination with Pop Tarts, and all the interesting "limited edition" flavors Kellogg's has been releasing lately, I didn't eat them very often while growing up.  I'm not sure why.  It isn't as if my mother was anti-processed food...after all, she gave us Pillsbury "food sticks," and who knows what those were made of?  But at least those were labeled as chocolate, peanut butter and vanilla rather than purely artificial flavors.

With Blue Raspberry Pop Tarts, Kellogg's has pretty much abandoned all pretense of these pastries being part of a nutritious breakfast.  At least all of their original Pop Tarts were based upon things found in nature--brown sugar and cinnamon, strawberry, blueberry and apple currant.  There is nothing natural about the bright Ti-D-Bowl blue color here...although theses pastries would look great next to a blue Powerade, Icee, Boo Berry cereal or cotton candy.  You know--things that will all make your poop turn green.

The flavor is a slightly tart raspberry, but it is not nearly strong enough to differentiate it from the regular raspberry Pop Tarts.  So, the selling point of this new flavor must be the blue color which extends to stripes on the white icing.  But that just makes it seem like you are eating a baby shower decoration...unlike the Wild Berry Pop Tarts with bright purple and blue that at least seem more offbeat and exciting.

To summarize, it doesn't taste any different than regular raspberry Pop Tarts, and it has a subdued color scheme for the outer frosting that doesn't make it stand out from any of the new "wild" flavors.  In other words, it is merely average.  This would be the Pop Tart that hangs out on the side of a room during a party, which you later forgot was even there.  Not bad, but nothing special either...

RATING:  3/5

SWEDISH FISH OREOS

There are flavors that taste great together...and then there are flavors that should be subject to a restraining order and never allowed to come within 90 feet of each other.  Swedish Fish Oreos are definitely in the latter group.

For anyone who might be unfamiliar with them, Swedish Fish are chewy candy more akin to a soft gumdrop than a gummi bear.  The flavor has never officially been disclosed, but there are those who suspect it is lingonberry due to its Swedish origin (and, yes, you can buy them at IKEA to go with your meatballs).  To me, Swedish Fish taste more like wild cherry than anything--and not the "good" kind of wild cherry as in a Life Saver, but the "bad" kind of wild cherry as in a Chlorasceptic throat lozenge.

The best that can be said about these cookies is that Oreo has captured the taste, if not the consistency, of Swedish Fish in the bright red creme.  You'll realize that immediately as you open the bag and inhale the aroma.  The creme is surrounded by the standard chocolate Oreo wafer rather than a graham or yellow cookie as many of the recent limited edition Oreos have been.  I suppose the Nabisco employee who came up with this combination might have been thinking about chocolate-covered cherry cordials.  Of course, the employee might also have been thinking about how many people he or she could make sick by proposing this combination.

Swedish Fish Oreos have a taste that will stay with you for a long time.  A very long time.  I violated the rules of childhood by having one before dinner, and yet after eating a full dinner and washing it down with a few drinks, I could *still* taste the Swedish Fish Oreo about an hour later.  I have a feeling that if I scraped the top of my tongue off with a cheese grater, I could still taste the Swedish Fish Oreo.  It may not be the worst thing I've ever eaten, but it is definitely the worst tasting cookie I've had in a long time...Oreo or otherwise!

RATING: 1/5