Category: nostalgia week

Hunt’s, the liquid assets of kids. Insert random story about making friends at Jewish summer camp here, bada bing, bada boom. So! Woe betide the kid whose mom packed peanut butter and jelly on flax bread fo’ sho’. It was almost as embarrassing as for the kids who thought that the Marilyn Monroe quote I invented on a quiet Facebook day was real and not completely made up, but I’m banking that the bulk of them won’t read this, so…I win.
Handi-Snacks has come out with quite a few funky flavors lately, and by funky, I obviously mean designed to make little kids cry. While I’d never tried ice cream sandwich inspired pudding before, I figured it deserved the old college try, as anything that costs under a dollar warrants. Perhaps it’s the power of suggestion, but there’s an aggressive milkiness to this that makes it almost taste like the real deal. Or at least, the chocolate wafer part. Despite its glossy, thick texture, the pudding itself has a certain severe lack of moisture and a dry, very cocoa-heavy aftertaste that mimics the cookie pretty well. The package is also incredibly meta and its enthusiastic visual, an ice cream cookie whizzing at record speeds into a pile of what I assume is this very pudding, provides a bonus recipe if you don’t care about health or sugar or dignity.
Where things fall apart in the realism factor is the mid-section. Most companies would slap some vanilla in there, call it a day and go home to watch Mad Men on DVD, but Handi-Snaxxx opted to try and flavor it like ice cream with less than stellar results. The end product tastes somewhere in between cereal marshmallows and Splenda and has a snarly, artificial aftertaste that lingers around like a teen loiterer. I mean, just look at that pudding pompadour. Fortunately, this was tempered by the strong and doubled chocolate layers, but still left a dry feeling in my mouth along with that fake sweetener on my breath. Bland. Boring. Lacking substance and riding on a tired gimmick. Ah, such is life.

It hurts to write this post because it feels like I’m peeling away a very dear, but vestigial part of my body. Like taking out my appendix, or lopping off an earlobe, admitting that Zebra Cakes are an abject failure, the wheezing obese diabetic token of snack cakes, physically pains me. Dr. D used to take me on weekends in her yellow VW bug and typically, our first order of business was to pick up some treats for the visit, forbidden favorites that followed an excursion to an animal shelter or Toys R Us. It was one of my first real feelings of equal power, how wonderful it felt to just hold up a pack of Zebra Cakes and get a nod of approval. Because of that the treat has stuck with me, holding a significance far beyond snack cakes. The zany zebra heralded one of my first brushes with responsibility- the joy and ensuing pain of eating too many Zebra Cakes.
Over a decade and a half later, I decided to revisit them out of pure nostalgic longing. I wasn’t disappointed to eat them again as they did rekindle the same delight I felt so many years back, still best paired with a 4-piece kid’s meal from Burger King and an episode of Angry Beavers, but I was disappointed to discover that a pack of these is worse, in almost every single respect, than eating a McDouble. This is right behind colored sunscreen and puppy feet on the ever-expanding list of “things that are adorable but should not, under any circumstances, be placed in a human’s mouth.” With a flimsy, crumbly structure and a persistent filminess, these things are basically the edible equivalent of the FBI Most Wanted List. They’re nasty hexagonal calorie bombs glued together with sweetened Floam. The texture seizes up and improves when subjected to a bout in the freezer, but primarily remains waxy on the outside and grainy with sugar on the inside. The zebra stripes don’t impart any chocolatey flavor to the cake at all.
While I’d wished the little cakes had tasted better, the reminiscence of kicking back with these and classic 90’s episodes of Nickelodeon is parallel to none, even the post-consumption guilt of realizing how much saturated fat is in these.