review – The Gothtober Blog

September 27, 2016September 27, 2016

Pumpkin Spice Oreo Review!

Hey there horror hounds and disco cats!

It’s that time of year again, when night prevails over day, when the most ordinary of folk transform into the macabre and morbid weirdos that we, here at Gothober, embody all year long. Autumn has descended, bringing with it the bountiful harvest of autumnal flavors and variations on the orange hue that food scientists can manage.

Today’s autumnal treat: Nabisco’s “Limited Edition” Pumpkin Spice crème Oreos

Once inside it’s noisy yellow packaging I’m confronted with 3 rows of tawny blonde cookies on either side of deep orange filling, whose hue have echoes of both butterscotch and rust. Wafting upward is a scent that equal parts vanilla Yankee Candle and Pillsbury frosting can, along with a note of sickly sweet; not unlike that new rubber ball.

I quickly, and greedily, lift the treat to my mouth! I bite down to feel a familiar Oreo texture sensation: the cookie crisp but not brittle, it’s filling yielding and unctuous. Then something new, a rush of holiday flavor! It’s flavor seems more apple cider spice than pumpkin spice. Crunching away, the flavor remains the same. There are notes of vanilla, warm and orange-y like autumnal centerpieces of nostalgia pressed into play-doh and sprinkled with golden spiced hay.

The residual flavor of it lingers….lingers….lingering for much longer than one anticipates. Its feeling is of a warm gingery glow whose welcome has been thoroughly worn. All things considered. Nabisco’s holiday offering, while succeeding at the flavor of an ephemeral autumn night, loses points when it hangs around for too damn long.

Something good that stays for too long.

I think I feel a holiday allegory coming on.

Overall: 5 disco blood bags out of 7.

Review by Ordinary Oliver

September 20, 2013September 20, 2013

Strong Emotions About S’Mores Flavored Candy Corn

There are passionate feelings about traditional candy corn. People either like candy corn, or they vehemently despise it, and getting them to try even weird hybrid candy corn flavors is a bit of a chore.

I’m a candy corn purist, can’t deal with super strange “Easter Corn” or “Valentine’s Corn” I don’t even know what those flavors are, freaks me right out.

S’mores are generally associated with summer and camping, but because of the chocolate and burnt marshmallow factor, they can overlap into Autumn as an acceptable Halloween candy concept. This means that candy corn offering the facsimile of s’mores is much more decent than, say, Christmas candy corn, which probably tastes like pine needles or gingerbread and… just… no.

The picture of the bag here looks much brighter and delicious than the actual bag I bought at Target, the real bag looks dull and decidedly inedible. The little triangles of brown, cream and orange could almost be rootbeer flavored, and they all look about 2 years old. But I’m all into the hype, so I got ’em, dumped in a bowl at CraftNight and recorded my observations.

“Kind of tastes like a Tootsie Roll. Meh.” Julie (who kept trying them over and over again through the course of the evening)

“That’s the stuff! It tastes like frosting, and marble chocolate cake!” Cynthia

“THIS should be candy corn, I hate candy corn!” Melody

“It’s not horrible. It still has the candy corn consistency.” Thomas

“They’re O.K.” Terry Lee

“YUM” Andy

“Pretty darn GOOD! I’m gonna have s’more!” Elaine

“Delicious!” Sarah

“It’s a mature flavor” Grace

“I tried each segment, and when you eat the segments separately, they don’t taste good. But when you eat the entire candy corn at once, it tastes better. The tip of the candycorn is supposed to be caramel, the middle is supposedly the marshmallow part, and the bottom is chocolate flavored. I don’t like them.” Veronica

Overall, the reaction was one of positivity, with a couple of “so-so” and one or two absolute disapproval ratings from people who don’t like candy corn in ANY flavor, or just couldn’t handle the taste.

These grow on you, they look rather unremarkable, but then, over time, you just keep going back to investigate the character of this candy again and again. Perhaps this is the mark of a good candy? It’s complex in that it really does have three distinct differently-flavored segments, all artificial, all vying for your attention. The taste is about 1,000 miles away from the combination of actual graham cracker, chocolate and marshmallow, but just the fact that a candy corn would have the audacity to believe in itself enough to inform you that it is evocative of s’mores makes you want to eat it.

Some people are going to get religious about these and seek them out and buy all of them, and some people will just eat them because they are there. The most dangerous aspect about them seems to be that even though many of us felt “so-so” about s’more flavored candy corns … we couldn’t stop eating them.

Thumbs up, get a bag for the party!

September 16, 2013

Gothtober Candy Review • M&Ms Pumpkin Spice

Gonna admit something: Pumpkin-flavored things usually make me want to skip in the opposite direction. It’s not because pumpkin isn’t awesome, it’s because all those cheap imitations of pumpkin flavor are usually so disappointing in a myriad of ways!

Pumpkin “flavor” tends to be cloying and overpowering, unlike the personality of most pumpkins. It’s either pumpkin FEVER where you can’t taste anything else, or it’s dusty pumpkin or it’s non-starter pumpkin, where you’re not sure what it is… but it isn’t pumpkin.

Thus, when I brought the product to CraftNight and spilled its contents into a bowl, I was ready for the outrage. But funnily enough, there was no outrage, but there were raised eyebrows. Here are some of the reactions I got:

Layers of flavors!
I feel like I’ve arrived at Fall!
Not bad.
Can I have a few more? Mmmmm!

If you’re looking for “pumpkin in your face” you’re not going to find it here. It’s like they somehow knew that last year’s white chocolate candy corn M&Ms were too far into the stratosphere to really be understood. Somehow we have a candy that shows restraint. When you try it, there are multiple avenues for your mind to visit as they melt in your mouth. There’s pumpkin… but there’s also cinnamon, obscure hints of other spices, and mostly chocolate. And I think it’s a good idea that they are chocolate, and that M&Ms stayed away from the white chocolate for this one. Not every new flavor has to make you do a backflip and a fist pump, some flavors can just be mellow and complex. In the world of artificial flavors, it seems like they never know when to ease up on the throttle, and this time somebody decided to mellow out.

Anyone who grew up eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos will not understand or be able to comprehend the subtleties of Pumpkin Spice M&Ms. They will think that Pumpkin Spice M&Ms are a penultimate experience, because their taste buds are dead. They will shrug their shoulders and walk away. They will feel like the illustration of the bewildered pumpkin M&M on the bag.

People are all up in arms arguing that these things taste more like red hots than pumpkins… and as a person who dislikes red hots pretty vehemently, they don’t taste like red hots. But they don’t overwhelm you with orange squash flavor either. There are three colors in the bag: Dark Brown, Orange and Dark Green, a hilariously awful set of colors, it’s like they’re trying to convince children to stay away from them. Even sports teams don’t go near this trio of colors! I’m sure that ©Mars had 19,000 focus groups before they developed these, I’m thinking it’s a small miracle this product ended up on the shelves.

This pumpkin idea is trying to get distinguished, it wants to be respected and well-received. It’s reaching out to people who like potpourri and crisp air and scented candles. It’s for square metal candy bowls in offices, and houses with a lot of square footage and reflective surfaces. Kids will think they are boring. Eating these and liking them might mean you are over 30. It might even mean that you are retired. If you have just ONE, and wait for it to melt in your mouth for 10 seconds, you might be pleasantly surprised.