Hostess Bakery Petites

I rarely venture down the snack cake aisle. Just too tempting!  I love Twinkies and Zingers especially, but they sure don't love me back. While perusing the healthy frozen entrees at my local Walmart Neighborhood store, I glanced at the snack cake aisle behind me and saw these. Made by Hostess, these are "decadent small batch treats." The products have no artificial colors or flavors and no high fructose corn syrup. That makes them healthy, right?  Don't answer that. I decided to get the Fudge Blondie Crispi Thins Cookie Thins and the White Fudge Vanilla Cake Delights. 

No artificial colors. Impressive. In case you didn't know what spirulina is, according to Wikipedia: Spirulina represents a biomass of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that can be consumed by humans and other animals. This has been approved for blue coloring. That ingredient list is pretty extensive. I also notice that the second ingredient is palm kernel oil, which is particularly unhealthy and bad for the environment. I will give Hostess credit for not using high fructose corn syrup, but that hardly matters when the first ingredients are sugar and palm oil. 

Nothing too surprising here. 210 for 3 little cakes, which are about the size of a ping pong ball. Lots of sugar, lots of carbs, lots of fat.

Here is a mini cake that I have cut open so you can see the inside compared to the image on the front of the package. Not too dissimilar, except the amount of creme is somewhat less than shown and the cake is more tan than beige. My husband and I tried these and our conclusion was the same. These are definitely tasty and the way they are packaged is dangerous if you find it hard to stop at the serving size. I thought the texture was somewhat stale and rubbery. Strong vanilla flavor was good, but to call the coating "white fudge" is a stretch. The coating was similar to what you'd find on a cheap Little Debbie snack cake. I paid $3.00 per bag for these for 7.9 ounces. Not my favorite and overpriced for what it is. I would have preferred a Twinkie.

The ingredient list here seems pretty straightforward, but what in the heck is cerelose? "Cerelose A commercial preparation of glucose containing about 9% water."  I'm not sure why this is in here. Seems like a "frankenfood" that is completely unncessary, especially for a product that is trying to pass itself off as "natural." Real vanilla, no artificial flavors or colors and no high fructose corn syrup, yet they include cerelose. 

The worst part of this nutrition label, in my opinion, is that you somehow have to judge what 1 ounce really means. Is it 5 pieces? 10 pieces?  It is very hard to determine since the cookie pieces are not all the same size. Some of them are broken pieces. You would have to own a food scale to really figure out how much you're eating. 

As you can see, the image on the package is not very representative of the actual product. What I have shown is just a random sample I took from the bag. Some had chips and some didn't. Interestingly; however, none of the pieces had more than two chips. The color is darker and the cookie itself is more crumbly than those pictured on the package. What did they taste like? Glad you asked. These are very good. The texture is thin, but not easily breakable and they almost melt in your mouth. The chip to cookie ratio was overall very good and even the pieces without chips are yummy. Strong but not overpowering vanilla flavor, which is typical for a "blondie." There is almost no way a person could present them on a platter as nicely as shown on the package. I'm not sure why a consumer would choose these over buying a traditional cookie unless you wanted a bag of broken chocolate chip cookies. Again, as with the cake delights, the packaging is dangerous for a person who had little self-control. These were $3.00 a bag for 6 ounces.  Good, but nothing spectacular or very new as far as taste.