Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2020December 22, 2020 steveboilardLeave a comment

In the spirit of the holiday, we have a special treat for you today. After the daily review (which appears immediately below), we’re going to summarize the top entries in each of my four categories, and then select a winner from each. I can almost hear the cheers from my far-flung readership….

Today’s treat is perhaps the most questionable of all the month’s entries. That’s because it has no added sugar. In fact, it isn’t processed at all. It’s just a naturally-occurring food that’s been stuck in a bag and cynically labeled as a Halloween treat. So yes, I’m obviously talking about Hobgoblin Grapes!

Packaging. We start off with the usual point for transparent packaging. But then we notice the nods to Halloween:

They’ve taken black, seedless grapes and re-branded them as “Harvest Hobgoblin Grapes.”
They include an illustration of what’s purportedly a hobgoblin, but which seems more like one of Santa’s elves gone bad.
There’s a cauldron of bats flying in front of a harvest moon. That’s always a sure-fire Halloween cliche.
The PLU (price look-up) code is on a pumpkin.
There’s (somewhat incongruously) a ghost behind the “Harvest Hobgoblin” title.
There’s a reference to trick or treat, with the self-congratulatory “no trick, all treat!”

Altogether, it’s a pretty good effort. I’ll give it three points.

2. Appearance of the Treat. Let’s face it. These are grapes. As such, they look like grapes. There’s really nothing especially appealing or Halloween-y about these. I suppose, to be generous, I could give a point for their being black, which is one of the two traditional Halloween colors. And since I’m indeed a generous guy, I will in fact award that one point.

3. Taste. Not only do these look like grapes; they taste like grapes. (I’m suddenly reminded of an old Cheech and Chong routine that all the middle-school kids had memorized in the 1970s.) Given that they have lots of natural sugar, I guess you could consider them a decent treat. But I can’t give more than one point when there’s no chocolate, nougat, sprinkles, icing, or other components of a self-respecting treat.

4. Value. My local grocery store had these for $1.79 per pound, which works out to about 11 cents per ounce. That’s among the least expensive of the treats that we’ve reviewed this month. On the other hand, if value is at all affected by the Treat Satisfaction Index (which is something I just made up), then the value declines. Let’s call it 2 points.

Steve’s Spooktoberfest Score: 7 out of 12 points, making it a minor TREAT. Get some for the neighborhood kid who’s allergic to real treats.

PART II: GREATEST HITS

We now move to the second look at the winners in each of the four categories over the course of the month. We start with packaging. There were 7 treats getting a full 3 points in this category:

PACKAGING WINNERS:

Oct 13: Frankenberry

Oct 16: Pumpkin beer

Oct 17: Monster pop

Oct 20: Cheetos Bag o’ Bones

Oct 24: Kettle corn

Oct 28: Cap’n Crunch’s Halloween Crunch

Oct 31: Hobgoblin grapes

Applying my usual carefully-controlled measurements and objective criteria (which involves a dart board and a blindfold), I have to hold up the Cap’n Crunch as the treat with the most Halloween-y packaging. It seems they didn’t leave any space on the box undecorated. If nothing else, the appearance of the good Cap’n as a tattered, luminescent ghost makes this a worthy packaging effort.

Moving on to APPEARANCE OF THE TREAT:

Oct 9: Mummy cookie

Oct 14: Spider donut

Oct 15: Frankenstein cookie

Oct 17: Monster pop

Oct 19: Caramel apple

Oct 21: Candy corn cookie

Oct 22: Halloween oreos

Oct 28: Cap’n Crunch

Oct 30: Cinnamon roll

This is a tough one. All these treats are a delight to behold. But I have to give the award to the spider donut. The vibrant colors and creative design are whimsical and festive. If there were a Nobel Prize for Halloween Treat design, it would go to the spider donut.

Turning now to the all-important category of TASTE:

Oct 7: Nerd rope

Oct 10: See’s pumpkin

Oct 14: Spider donut

Oct 17: Monster pop

Oct 19: Caramel apple

Oct 22: Halloween oreos

Oct 23: Reese’s white chocolate pumpkin

Oct 24: Kettle corn

Oct 26: Russell Stover candy corn pumpkin

This is another tough choice. To select a winner, I thought about which treat I’d most like to have if I were stuck on a desert island with no other treats for a month. Framed in this way, the answer is obvious: it’s the Russell Stover candy corn pumpkin. You’ll recall that the candy corn part isn’t really the decisive factor here; instead, it’s the white fudge, enveloped in white chocolate. Never let it be said that I’m snobbish about my treats–I mean, Russell Stover?!

Now for the little matter of VALUE:

Oct 2: Russell Stover marshmallow pumpkin

Oct 3: Russell Stover peanut butter pumpkin

Oct 7: Nerd Rope

Oct 8: Popcorn ball

Oct 14: Spider donut

Oct 19: Caramel apple

Oct 26: Russell Stover candy corn pumpkin

Oct 30: Cinnamon roll

To identify a winner, I used a complicated and proprietary formula that combines cost-per-ounce with bliss factor and Halloweeniness. I plugged the data into my computer and the winner was revealed to be the caramel apple. It’s an old-timey Halloween treat that appeals to my nostalgia, plus it’s decorated in fall colors and it has a really nifty ghost ring. If I really wanted to justify this choice, I could note that there’s even some nutritional value to an apple.

OK, now to cut it another way, we can look at the total points earned by each treat. All the month’s treats are listed below, with their total scores. Note that two treats tied for first place.

Oct 1 Frankencup: 7 points

Oct 2: Russell Stover marshmallow pumpkin: 5 points

Oct 3: Russell Stover peanut butter pumpkin: 5 points

Oct 4: Jelly belly pumpkins: 2 points

Oct 5: Kinder egg: 6 points

Oct 6: Reese’s regular pumpkin: 7 points

Oct 7: Nerd rope: 9 points

Oct 8: Popcorn ball: 10 points

Oct 9: Mummy cookie: 6 points

Oct 10: See’s pumpkin: 6 points

Oct 11: Pop tarts: 6 points

Oct 12: Pepperidge farm cookies: 2 points

Oct 13: Frankenberry: 5 points

Oct 14: Spider donut: 10 points

Oct 14: Ghost pepper donut: 3 points

Oct 15: Frankenstein cookie: 5 points

Oct 16: Pumpkin beer: 5 points

Oct 17: Monster pop: 11 points

Oct 18: Jelly Belly Monster Mash: 2 points

Oct 19: Caramel apple: 11 points

Oct 20: Cheeto’s Bag o’ Bones: 7 points

Oct 21: Candy corn cookie: 7 points

Oct 22: Halloween Oreos: 10 points

Oct 23: Reese’s White Chocolate pumpkin: 7 points

Oct 24: Kettle corn: 10 points

Oct 25: Pumpkin chips: 2 points

Oct 26: Russell Stover candy corn pumpkin: 9 points

Oct 27: Kit Kat: 4 points

Oct 28: Cap’n Crunch’s Halloween Crunch: 9 points

Oct 29: Spooky Lips: 2 points

Oct 30: Cinnamon roll: 9 points

Oct 31: Hobgoblin grapes: 7 points

Finally, like a graduate student showing off statistical operations toward no real meaningful purpose, I’d like to point out that there were three treats that each earned perfect scores of 3 points in three categories. They are:

Oct 14; Spider donut

Oct 17: Monster pop

Oct 19: Caramel apple

So there you have it. I hope you appreciate my eating 31 different Halloween treats (actually, it was 32, since I sampled two different donuts on October 14) on your behalf. I hope you all have a wonderful Halloween, and stay tuned for next October when I review classic scary movies. In the meantime, this blog will return to chronicling my travel adventures around California and beyond.

And now, in the spirit of Halloween, I’ll leave you with not just one “Boo!”, but two:

On a Roll

October 30, 2020December 22, 2020 steveboilardLeave a comment

One of the best things about doing this treat blog in October is that I feel obligated to purchase and consume sweets on a daily basis. (Don’t try this at home; I’m a trained professional.) This morning, for example, I was feeling a bit peckish for a baked good. The treat gods were apparently smiling on me, for when I got to the grocery store there was a Halloween-themed cinnamon roll staring back at me from the bakery case.

Cinnamon rolls, I think we can all agree, are basically a delivery system for icing. No one really cares about the relatively-bland, sometimes-dry bread that serves as the foundation for the cinnamon roll. In fact, if that bread didn’t have cinnamon, I’m pretty sure it would indistinguishable from a slice of Wonder Bread. But something magical happens with you add the icing. The genius of the cinnamon roll is the “roll” part; that is, you get icing not just coating its exterior surface, but you also get icing (or sometimes a cinnamon-sugar goo) lining the interior spiral.

I’ll admit that you don’t normally think of cinnamon rolls as part of the Halloween Treat Pantheon. But the good people at Ralph’s decided to drizzle an orange icing on top of the traditional white icing, instantly turning it into a Halloween Treat. This might be classified as gilding the lily, but I’d call it inspired. You can’t have too much icing. (Refer to the previous paragraph.)

So let’s get on with the review!

Packaging. The packaging consists solely of a clear plastic clamshell. There’s no brand name, no cute mascot, no description, no “nutrition facts,” no nothing. But even though I can’t give the packaging any points for Halloween imagery, I will, per tradition, award 1 point for letting me see the actual treat prior to purchase.

2. Appearance of the Treat. Although simple in concept, the appearance of this cinnamon roll is impressive. It starts with a standard cinnamon roll with regulation white icing. It’s then drizzled with a secondary icing in that perfect shade of Halloween Confectionary Orange which both denotes Halloween and promises sugary goodness. The design of said secondary icing is evocative of a spider web, and reminds me of the logo of Boris Karloff’s “Thriller” television series from the 1960s.

A TV Series Review by Walker Martin: THRILLER (1960-1962).

So let’s review: Halloween orange, sugary goodness, Boris Karloff. That’s worth 3 points.

3. Taste. On the one hand, the bread of this cinnamon roll, like so many cinnamon rolls, was disappointingly dry. Clearly they skimped on the all-important cinnamon goo which belongs along the inner spiral. But the double-icing coating inclined me toward forgiveness. The icing was thick and fresh and gooey, and suffused my mouth, almost (but not quite) masking the dryness of the bread. So let’s do the math: 3 points for the icing, and 1 point for the bread, produces an average of 2 points.

4. Value. This fresh-baked, generously-iced treat set me back a mere 4 bits. Over time that works out to maybe $10 per cavity. It’s definitely a good value. 3 points.

Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 9 points out of 12, making it a solid TREAT. If you can’t find one at your local grocery store, at least you can watch Thriller on YouTube for free.

Halloween candy · Uncategorized

Antepenultimate Treat

October 29, 2020December 22, 2020 steveboilardLeave a comment

(I always look for an opportunity to use that word.) (No, not treat; antepenultimate!)

I’ve spent a good portion of this month trying to find a few old-timey Halloween treats that I remember from my misspent youth: syrup-filled wax skeletons, candy bones strung on an elastic bracelet, candy cigarettes, wax lips… I’ve failed in my efforts to locate those bygone treats, but I did find something close. Allow me to tell the tale:

Behold the “Spooky Lip Pop!” It’s not wax lips, exactly, because you could sort of eat the wax lips. I was never entirely clear whether they were intended to be edible, but technically you could bite off a chunk and chew it into a crumbly mass that, if you were lucky, would cohere sort of like chalky gum. Today’s “Spooky Lip Pop,” however, is made of entirely inedible plastic lips, to which is attached a candy bulb in the fashion of a baby’s pacifier. So let’s get down to the review.

Packaging. Alert readers know that I give points for clear packaging which allows the potential consumer to see the actual product. This is no exception. You can clearly see the plastic lips and teeth which look like they’re in need of some serious orthodontia. There’s also a drawing of a pair of creepy-looking zombie hands in desperate need of a manicure, as well as random body parts (an eyeball, some phlegm, and who knows what else). It’s definitely not appealing packaging. In fact, it evokes the old Wacky-Packages of my youth, which used disgusting wordplay and double-entendres to gross out young consumers. I’ll give it 2 points.
Appearance of the Treat. As noted above, the treat is clearly visible through the packaging. But once you liberate it from the packaging, you encounter a cute (?) cartoon face that’s demonstrating how to use the candy pacifier. As if it isn’t intuitive.

For some reason, I found it to be a clever little prop. True, the artwork is amateurish and the size is out of scale. And why would a zombie, with leaking brains and mismatched eyes, feel a need to use fake teeth to make himself look weirder? But it’s still kind of playful. The plastic lips/teeth themselves are reasonably well rendered. See how Mr. Spookybones models them:

I’ll give this a definite 2 points for appearance.

3. Taste. The business end of this treat is a bulb-shaped hunk of sugar that supposedly tastes like blue raspberry. It got me to wondering if there’s even such a fruit as blue raspberry. And evidently there is! But it’s doubtful that any Rubus leucodermis gave up their lives for this treat. Anyway, it tastes mainly just like sugar, maybe with a hint of a nondescript fake flavor you get in a Slurpee or whatever. But let’s face it: You don’t buy a plastic, lip-shaped pacifier for its culinary verisimilitude. I’m willing to give this 2 points, because I’ve been sucking on it since I started writing this review, and it’s inoffensive. (Special note: As I’ve gotten down there the end of the pop, I’ve discovered a plastic pointy-thing sticking out of the candy. I’m not sure this would be the best thing to be giving to small kids on Halloween.)

4. Value. It cost me a buck at Party City. It’s the closest thing to wax lips I’ve been able to find, so supply and demand must confer some value on this. I’ll give it 2 points.

Steve’s Spooktoberfest Score: 8 out of 12 points, which qualifies as a minor TREAT. Get yours while you can. Or take out a life insurance policy on a toddler and give this to him.

Halloween candy · Uncategorized

Crunchatize Me

October 28, 2020December 22, 2020 steveboilardLeave a comment

Alert readers will recall that I’ve wanted to try Cap’n Crunch’s Halloween Crunch, but all my efforts to find a box of the stuff have come up empty.

So my son, Ian B. (I’m protecting his identity by not revealing his last name, though coincidentally it begins with the same letter as mine does) ordered a box online and shared the results with me. So, kudos to him. He’s back in the will.

Cap’n Crunch was first released in 1963, and over the years it’s been available in various special and seasonal flavors. In 2007 Halloween Crunch was released, and it’s reappeared each fall (including, allegedly, this year. See Ian B if you want a box.) By the way, if you really want to go down a rabbit hole, check out the “declassified FBI files” on Cap’n Crunch, whose full name is said to be Horatio Magellan Crunch.

But back to Halloween Crunch. The whole point of this cereal is that it turns the milk in your bowl green. So if that’s not a good reason to include it in our blog, I don’t know what is. Now on with the show!

Packaging. Now these people know how to infuse their packaging with proper Halloween spirit. Let us count the ways:

Eerie black background.
Questionable greenish miasma hanging around the Cap’n.
Speaking of the Cap’n, he looks like a ghost!
And not just a ghost; note that his clothes are tattered and there’s a bite taken out of his bicorne hat.
There’s a cauldron of bats (I think that’s the right animal grouping term) on the upper corner.
Ghosts are flying out of the cereal bowl.
Spooky script is employed to tell us that “ghosts turn milk green!”
Even the “nutrition” info at the bottom of the panel is colored green.

And then, moving to the back of the box…

9. There’s a “haunted Guppy” game printed on the panel, with:

10. a bunch of bats

11. a spider’s web maze, complete with spider.

12. a skull and crossbones on the mainsail

13. Kids dressed up in Halloween costumes

14. a coffin

15. a tombstone

16. And the Cap’n is now wearing a vampire’s cape.

So, overall, this packaging oozes Halloween spirit. I would be a chump to give it anything less than 3 points.

2. Appearance of the Treat. It starts out looking like Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries.

The only difference is that the Crunchberries are supposedly shaped like ghosts. (I’m not so sure they’ve succeeded in that regard, though. When I was in 2nd grade Leslie Martin got in trouble for drawing the same shape on the bathroom wall.) Anyway, it’s notable that these Crunch-phalli are a pink color, and yet they’re supposed to be what turns the milk green. Let’s see how they, ahem, perform, as it were.

As soon as the milk his the ghosts, they began to emit a greenish dye. It’s impressive, if a bit disturbing, to watch green fluid shooting out of your breakfast cereal. But the ghosts definitely did their job. Once you finish the cereal, you’re left with what looks like a bowl of the toxic waste into which the Joker fell in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie.

So, while I’m not sure I’d call the result appetizing, it does do a Halloween trick, as promised. And for that I’ll give it 3 points.

3. Taste. There are two kinds of people in this world: There are those who enjoy Cap’n Crunch, and then there are those who don’t especially like having the roof of their mouth lacerated with abrasive breakfast cereal. If you’re in the former group, you like the taste of sweet (almost syrupy) oats. In which case you’re in luck, because the Halloween version of Cap’n Crunch tastes no different that regular Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries. In my opinion, though, the folks at Quaker Oats missed an opportunity to infuse it with a flavor related to the green color: mint, for example. There’s nothing special about the taste of this Halloween edition, so I can only award 1 point.

4. Value. This box is “family size!” (exclamation point original). You get 22.8 ounces (isn’t that a nice round number?) for $3.79. That works out to 16.6 cents per ounce. Compare that to Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries, which is available in “giant size!” (26 ounces) for $3.64, or 14 cents per ounce. So you’re paying a premium for the green dye. And yet it’s still cheaper than Frankeberry (20 cents per ounce). So let’s say Halloween Crunch gets 2 points for value.

Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 9 out of 12 points, making it a solid TREAT. With the addition of ghosts to his cereal, the Cap’n is keepin’ it (incorpo)real.

Halloween candy · Uncategorized

Trumpet Tavern

October 27, 2020December 22, 2020 steveboilard2 Comments

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!

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.”