Trumpet Tavern

Once again, we will award bonus points to the first person to correctly describe the relevance of today’s title. And kudos to Chris F, who was the first to point out that last week’s “The Egg and I” was the title of a 1945 novel that introduced Ma and Pa Kettle, thus linking to the kettle corn that was under review in the blog that day.

Today we’re trying a special seasonal version of the Kit Kat bar. Kit Kats trace back to the 1930s in Britain, but didn’t come to the US until 1970. Like so many confections, the Kit Kat spawned a number of different versions of itself in the 1990s, including orange, mint, and caramel.

In 2017 a pumpkin pie-flavored Kit Kat was released for the Halloween season. It’s become quite popular each October. So let’s review it!

1. Packaging. Well, there’s a lot of orange, so that’s something. There’s also a picture of a Kit Kat sliced in two, and a photo of a slice of actual pumpkin pie. Some random clip art of pumpkins and fall leaves round out the front of the package. Overall, there’s a kitchen-sink quality about all these images. But wait–there’s more! Turn the bag over and you see that someone has drawn cartoonish googly eyes on a handful of Kit Kat bars. They also each have a leaf sprouting from their head, and what appears to be a poop emoji plopped on top. It’s a little hard to know what they were going for here. And then, in a bit of self-aware corniness, they write “Good gourd that’s cute” next to the drawings.

Now, I should note that this is a bag of individually-wrapped, miniature Kit Kats. So let’s take a look at those individual wrappers:

The front has more of that random clip art, but I have to admit that the overall effect is a bit more cohesive and balanced than the bag’s design. And then they use the back of these individual wrappers to explain how to open the thing. Like it’s a childproof container or something.

Overall, I think the packaging is all over the place, without any cohesive theme. And, I don’t know, wouldn’t Halloween have been a suitable theme for these pumpkin pie candies that are individually wrapped to give to kids on Halloween? I can’t in good conscience give the packaging more than 1 point.

2. Appearance of the Treat. It’s a single segment of a Kit Kat bar. The folks at Hershey call these segments “fingers,” and a normal bar has four of them, connected together with chocolate. Other than the size, the only other feature to distinguish the look of this candy from the usual version is the color. It’s a reasonable facsimile of pumpkin pie filling, so that’s worth a point or two. Heck, I’ll give it two points.

3. Taste. Remember those treats shaped like little wax bottles, that contained some kind of syrup that was supposed to taste like grape or cherry? Remember how incredibly artificial it tasted, causing your taste buds to burn, and your saliva glands to pump out copious quantities of liquid in an effort to dilute the chemicals, and your central nervous system to essentially shut down? The “pumpkin pie” flavor of these Kit Kats is similar to that. They remind me of the Torani pumpkin syrup I once added to a coffee, which after one sip I had to pour out. In a word, these Kit Kats taste fake. Not in a benign way, like Lik-M-Aid or Slurpees, but in a malignant, life-threatening way like rat poison. No points.

4. Value. Being as it’s getting close to the end of the month, the local grocery store was unloading these at half price. So I paid 2 bucks for this bag of 32 candies. That’s a little more than 6 cents per candy. If they were edible at all, that would score 3 points. Even with my disgust over their taste, I feel obliged to give a sympathy point for value. It’s that good of a price. 1 point.

Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 4 out of 12 points, which makes it a definite TRICK. I recommend you give these Kit Kats the “finger.”