I Tried McDonald’s Bacon BBQ Burger

Remember Checkers’ old Wild West Bacon Cheeseburger? Well, this ain’t quite as good as that long-discontinued fast food favorite, but for what it’s worth, it’s still a pretty solid L-T-O sandwich

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A Tribute To The Fast Food Burgers of Summer 2017!

Bidding summer adieu the only way that makes sense: by reminiscing on all of the seasonal, limited-time-only hamburgers that have been making us fat since Memorial Day.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

With Halloween rapidly approaching and the official cutoff date for autumn sneaking up on us (it's Sept. 22, if you were keen on the specifics), I reckon now is as dandy a time as ever to reminisce on the limited-time-only fast food hamburgers that made Summer 2017 one of the most memorable ever for people who don't care about dying ten years earlier than they should've. All in all it was a pretty solid season for special-edition burgers, with just about every major chain you can think of trotting out at least one major LTO offering. Really, this thing could've been 30 or 40 entries long if I honestly put the effort into it, but I reckon limiting the retrospective to just ten LTO burgers is good enough. So what do you say we cut the empty pleasantries and get right down to business, eh? Yeah - I didn't think your fat-ass would complain, no how.

McDonald's Signature Crafted Burgers!

This is as good a place as any to begin our whirlwind tour of seasonal fast food hamburgers, since the May launch of the trio above more or less marked the beginning of the LTO summer rush. The gimmick here was that Mickie's D was allowing you to custom build your burger from a select group of ingredients; i.e., you could pick a regular hamburger bun or a greasy ass artisanal roll, pack it with beef, fried chicken or grilled chicken, etc. The burgers came in three different dressings, which I've outlined from top to bottom; the pico-guacamole permutation, the sweet BBQ bacon iteration (which came with both grilled and fried onions) and the maple bacon Dijon variation, which was apparently the least popular of the trifecta since it got subbed out for the Signature Sriracha burger a few months after it dropped. All three were pretty good (if not overpriced) burgers, but really, they didn't offer anything wildly different from anything you've probably eaten before. Still, it was cool to see McDonald's at least try to bring a little diversity to their all-too-predictable menu lineup; maybe we'll get lucky and they'll finally resurrect the Arch Deluxe for Summer '18?

Hardee's Jalapeno Double Cheeseburger!

Hardee's (known as Carl's Jr.'s on the West Coast, for whatever stupid ass reason), is one of those chains that's ALWAYS releasing seasonal LTO Franken-burgers. Indeed, they usually trot out some kind of newfangled specialty sandwich every two weeks, and this here Jalapeno Double Cheeseburger is one of the better they've churned out over the last couple of years. The ingredients are pretty basic: you've got sliced pepper jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, two chunks of beef and a couple of chunks of diced, pickled peppers thrown in for good measure. But what really made this sumbitch pop was the proprietary Santa Fe Sauce, which was a really nice goulash of chipotle, barbecue and some kind of mayonnaise like substance I just can't put my finger on (so yeah, it was probably just plain old mayonnaise.) Few things in life irk me as much as fast food that touts itself as being spicy that don't live up to their own hype, but this one really impressed me for a change. That you can still get these suckers for $2.50 a pop in locations in the remote American southeast suggests the things were quite the regional sellers; I take it these little buggers are now going to be an annual offering, right, Hardee's/Carl's Jr.'s executive marketing department?

Steak 'n Shake's Bacon 'n Cheese Triple Xtreme!

I'm not entirely sure how many words I can say about the Bacon 'n Cheese Triple Xtreme burger, but I'll give it my best shot. Obviously, the Steak 'n Shake offering is a humongous, 900 calorie-plus abomination of a sandwich, complete with no less than three huge ass strips of bacon. I don't remember too much about the sandwich (basically, it tasted like any other steakburger you'd get at the eatery, only far heavier) but I DO remember it having a downright preposterous amount of sodium in it - like, an entire day's worth. But hey, we don't eat fast food burgers because we're trying to live forever - we're just doing it to enjoy today while we're still able to, ain't we?

Chick-Fil-A's Smokehouse BBQ Bacon Sandwich!

Chick-Fil-A is a chain that doesn't fuck around with its core menu that much, so this early summer addendum to the line-up was a pretty big deal. As you can see with your own peepers, it was a grilled chicken breast topped with two strips of bacon, marble cheese and a hearty dollop of sugary (but not too sugary) BBQ sauce. I'm not sure which brand it was, but I assure you it was pretty doggone good - I mean, not as solid as the shit good old J.R. hawks, but good nonetheless. Anyhoo, I thought it was a very, very good little sammich, and since it only packed about 500 or so calories, it was also one of the healthier (I guess less unhealthy is a more fitting term) LTO burgers circulatin' around the fast-food-o-sphere. And apparently it's a pretty big hit with the bible-readin', first-wife-havin', homosexual-marriage-denyin' C-F-A base - I mean, here we are in September, and in my neck of the woods the thing is still being advertised all over the place.

Arby's Triple Thick Brown Sugar Bacon BLT!

So, uh, does a product still technically count as a burger even if it doesn't actually have a burger inside it? I'm hedging my bets and saying this Arby's LTO qualifies, despite its flagrant lack of a patty of any kind. As the picture above indicates, it's basically just a huge honking sandwich filled with lettuce, mayo, tomato and - the obvious selling point - three downright humongous pieces of artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, deep fried sugar-encrusted bacon supplying it with its protein quotient. Alike Burger King, Arby's is a franchise that's always trotting out LTO stuff, a strategy akin to Sega's in the mid 1990s when they kept releasing consoles nobody in their right mind would've purchased out of the desperate, childlike hope that at least one of their wacky ideas would've stuck. And with that clumsy analogy in mind, the absolute best thing I can say about the Triple Thick Brown Sugar Bacon BLT is that it, indeed, tasted way better than anything that came out on the 32X.

Wendy's Bacon Queso Burger!

Really, Wendy's should've called this the "fuck your pants burger," because there's scientifically no way to consume it without getting at least four ounces of chili all over your blue jeans. Despite being billed as a "queso" burger, the bulk of the LTO sandwich comes in the form of a weird-tasting red sauce, which isn't quite cheese or chili - just this iffy, disharmonious batter runoff comprised of the two. Throw in a couple more bizarre toppings choices - ick, red onion and unmelted cheddar cheese! - and you have a strong candidate for the season's least special special edition burger. Unless by "special" you underhandedly mean "retarded," and in that case, this thing is unquestionably the specialist thing I've ate all summer, and that's coming from a motherfucker who just ate a two pound ice cream sorbet shaped like a watermelon. 

Freddy's Hatch Green Chile Double Steakburger!

As one of those "off-brands" that can't decide whether or not it's slightly upmarket fast food a'la Steak 'N Shake or a genuine, faux-prestige burger joint a'la Red Robin, it's pretty easy to forget Freddy's Frozen Custards and Steakburgers exists sometimes. And that's a shame, because some of the stuff the restaurant trots out, like this LTO Hatch Green Chile Double Steakburger, is actually pretty good. As the name implies, this is one spicy motherfucker, with a ton of grilled onions and diced jalapenos doused atop the patty, thus ensuring a most painful shat the next time your assbone meets toilet lid. But thankfully, this mustard soaked seasonal delight is so yummy going down that you won't even mind the fact it turns your asshole into a flamethrower 12 hours later. If they're still selling these suckers around your parts, do yourself a favor and give these things a try - but for fuck's sake, make sure you've got some 2-ply T.P. waiting for you at home.

Sonic's Ultimate Dunked Garlic Parmesan Chicken Sandwich!

Well, you can't say Sonic didn't at least partially deliver what they promised here. This sandwich came with what is EASILY the biggest chicken patty I've ever eaten in my life. We're talking a slab of deep-fried poultry easily the same circumference as a saucer plate, or maybe even a really small Frisbee. While the patty wasn't as flavorful as the usual Chick-Fil-A patty, it was definitely a step up from what you'd get at McDonald's or Burger King, for sure. As for the Garlic Parmesan part (they also sold buffalo sauce and bourbon barbecue doused iterations of the same sammich), they basically just dumped a fuck-ton of Italian dressing all over the lettuce then grated some Parmesan cheese and said "eh, good enough." The brioche bun was oilier than a motherfucker, and it was nigh impossible to take a bite without at least four or five splotches of garlic juice getting all over the place. Still, it was a damned filling and unexpectedly flavorful little LTO burger; now I'd LOVE to see what the chain can do with their own Chicken Parmesan sandwich.

Arby's Bourbon BBQ Triple Stack!

Yeah, I know we already took a look at one of Arby's seasonal offerings, but this thing was already on my camera roll and really, why waste such primo footage? Again, we can argue until the cows come home as to whether this quad-meated sandwich technically meets the criteria for a burger, but the way I see it, as long as it's dead something wedged in-between two sesame seeded buns and there's cheese all over it, by golly, it ought to count as a burger. Even now I'm not entirely sure what all was in that thing, but I think it was brisket, slivers of steak, mulched up turkey and brown sugar bacon. Oh, and there were some fried onion bits and cheddar cheese in there, too, and - of course - the whole damn thing was drenched in a savory, sugary bourbon-flavored barbecue sauce. And perhaps the most amazing thing about the item? Despite basically being an entire barnyard dumped in between two buns, it only registered 760 calories. Oh, and 2,470 milligrams of salt, which is only about 1,000 more than the FDA says is safe for daily human consumption.

Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich!

And we conclude with the only LTO burger of summer 2017 it would make any sense to conclude with - Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich, which is clearly the most idiosyncratically summery of any of the burgers we've taken a gander at in this article. This sandwich could only be released during summer, when the temps are north of 80 degrees at 7 in the morning and just walking around feels like a synthwave song. We're talking charbroiled chicken breast, we're talking a goddamn chunk of grilled pineapple on top of that and fuckin' half a bottle of teriyaki sauce dumped on top of that. Any other time of the year such a product would be deemed too ludicrous for consideration, but when it's boiling hot outside and sweat is dripping off your balls and the only sport that's on TV is baseball, all of a sudden spending millions to market and mass-produce a chicken-pineapple-and-teriyaki-sauce burger makes all the sense in the world. For better or for worse, this was the unofficial burger of summer 2017, with every bite tasting like Charlottesville, Mayweather vs. McGregor and the solar eclipse while "Stay" loops endlessly in the background. And in a way, that disjointed jumble of ingredients is an almost perfect metaphor for the season that was. We began with James Comey getting shitcanned and ended with Houston getting turned into Atlantis, and in the middle? We had the Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich, which I'll always remember eating in slow-motion while Coldplay and the Chainsmokers' "Something Just Like This" blaring in the ocean breeze. Not only do I have no problems labeling this sandwich the official LTO burger of summer 2017, I have half a mind to go on ahead and declare it the official physical embodiment of summer 2017 itself. Like a long lost lover, we'll never forget you, Hardee's Charbroiled Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich - and all I can say is "thanks for the memories, but fuck you in the ass for ruining my only GOOD pair of khaki Dockers, you teriyaki-drippin' cocksucker."

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PEEPS-Flavored Oreos Review!

Now do you believe me that this whole "co-branding" food trend has dragged on long enough?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

In marketing speak, there's this thing called "co-branding." Basically, it's whenever two brands come together to simultaneously hype one hybrid product. Now, in the fast food/junk food industry, we've been seeing this going on for years, and perhaps no product not called "Pop-Tarts" has milked the gimmick as hard as Nabisco's Oreos.

Go ahead, type "Oreos" in the little search box at the top of the page and you'll be barraged by a seemingly endless array of fucked up flavored twist-top sandwich cookies. Cotton candy-flavored Oreos. Red velvet cake-flavored Oreos. Lemon-flavored Oreos. Cookie dough-flavored Oreos. Rice Krispies-flavored Oreos. For fuck's sake, they even made watermelon-flavored Oreos, and somehow, the NAACP didn't stage any protests. And that's not even counting the Oreos even my LTO-obsessed ass never got around to trying, like the root-beer flavored ones or the ones that purportedly tasted like Swedish Fish. Aye, one of the greatest regrets of my adulthood is never getting to try those limited time only cookies 'n' creme Oreos at Kroger ... what were, effectively, special edition Oreos-flavored Oreos.

Granted (and this is gloriously evident by my excessive coverage of said products), I don't really have a conceptual problem with these "variation" Oreos. I wholeheartedly believe in the free market and whoring out novelty items, but one of the things that really peeves me to no end are those aforementioned "co-branded" products. You know the kinda' stuff I'm talking about here. Crush-flavored Pop-Tarts. Burger King Fried Cheetos. Taco Bell selling Cap'n Crunch Cinnabon Delights (which is actually a rare - if not foreboding) example of a tri-branded co-product.) These are just the laziest things in the world, the junk food equivalent of all those shitty "mash-up" albums that used to be popular about 10 years ago. No, taking two semi-divergent things and slamming them headlong into a Franken-snack-food isn't the same thing as building an original product permutation from the ground up (and if any of you wanna' give me any shit about the Hegelian dialectic, I'll fist fight you anytime and anywhere.) Here, the intrinsic appeal of the LTO isn't the product's core flavor, but simply the fact that it's a pre-existing brand that kinda sorta tastes like an entirely different pre-existing brand. Instead of taste taking center-stage, the entire product hook revolves around the texture and the fact you're consuming one product in a different form than your are generally accustom to. I mean, does anybody out there really want to know what it's like to chew Dr. Pepper instead of drink it? Well, apparently, corporate America thinks you do, and as long as people keep buying A&W Root Beer Twizzlers and cheeseburgers from Carl's Jr. that taste like Budweiser, you're pretty much signing 'em a permission slip telling them it's A-OK with you if they keep shoveling this half-baked crap on store shelves and fast food menus.

Which brings us to perhaps the most shameless co-branded foodstuff ever -- motherfuckin' PEEPS-flavored Oreos. 

Now folks, you really have to think long and hard about the Peeps track record. After all, this is a company that actually tried to sell consumers marshmallow chicken flavored milk  a few years back, so it's pretty much a given that these people will sell anything with the Peeps logo on it as long as they think it's kooky enough to ensnare consumers who apparently only eat the weirdest limited-time-only shit at the grocery store (meaning, effectively, me.) In that, I have more than a few questions, perhaps the most pertinent one being is the Peeps brand flavor really all that recognizable to the average American consumer? I mean, all marshmallow products more or less taste the exact same in terms of mouthfeel and general texture, so really, the only thing you can do to set yourself apart from the herd is add more sugar or spruce the shit up with artificial flavoring. And since Peeps is a brand so dependent on flavor variations to begin with, does the company even have a flagship original flavor to promote or pride itself on? To me, those baby chicks they sell every Easter have never really tasted like anything more than standard marshmallows, albeit with a speckling of crystallized sugar on the outside to give it the illusion of some kind of aesthetic glimmer. And since that's the big selling point for these co-branded Oreos, I can't help but wonder if the folks at Peeps even really understood how to market their own damn product here.

I guess you really don't need me to run down the general idea of what Oreos are, do I? Understandably, Nabisco opted for the alternate uni "golden vanilla" exterior shell, which I suppose makes a good deal of sense ... that is, until you suddenly realize that by eschewing the regular black twist top cookie hue, you found yourself robbed of eating what would've been Bret Hart-stylized Oreos.

The interior creme is a bright purplish-pink hue, which for some reason, makes me think of this one girl I dated my sophomore year in college who wore a blinding neon lipstick shade practically the same color. You can detect a little bit of shimmery sugar sprinkles here and there, but by and large, as soon as you crack these sumbitches open, you're pretty much staring at Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in edible paste form. Well, that, or a wad of already chewed up bubblegum. Needless to say ... they prolly could've improved the basic aesthetics on this one.

Of course, the only thing that really matters is how the product tastes, and these Peeps-influenced Oreos taste like ... well, I'm not really sure. It's usually pretty hard to replicate the overall texture of marshmallow in artificial form, but somehow, someway, Nabisco managed to make this creme at least feel a little more airy and pillowy than your average Oreos creme. Or maybe, my mind was playing tricks on me and I was just imagining all that gustatory bounciness - I wouldn't be surprised, either way.

But does the damn thing taste like a Peep? Well, I'm not really sure I'd describe this thing's flavor as, uh, Peep-ish. I guess it has a similar flavor, but really, the Peeps just taste like sugary fluff as is so it's kinda hard to nail down the intricacies and nuances of whatever its core taste is supposed to be. Your tongue does pick up the light tingle of one of those heavily touted sugar crystals, though, which is a nice experiential touch. But yeah, at the end of the day, these things just taste like slightly fluffier, slightly sugarier and 100 percent pinker Oreos, and that's about it. 

I'm not sure how much money Peeps or Oreos are going to make off this stuff (but boy, would I love to know what their profit-sharing set-up is like), but I really wonder if the promotional and cross-licensing costs come anywhere close to meeting the earned revenue of the LTO cookies. Maybe that's why we're seeing such a proliferation of co-and-tri-branded foodstuffs these days - if the fusion product loses money, I guess it's a smaller overall financial loss for each brand then it would have been if they lost money on a proprietary, from-the-ground-up, in-house solo product launch. 

It might seem like a ludicrous jihad to take up, but I can't help but ponder exactly where this conglomerated brand fad is going to take us over the next few years. Sure, it's all fairly innocuous now, with our goofy Peeps-flavored Oreos and whatnot, but how long before we're seeing companies forming symbiotic branding plans with the intent of deterring start-up products from ever entering the grocery store supply chain? That's one of the things nobody really thinks about when it comes to co-branded foods. For every needless, superfluous merger-food, that means less shelf space for anything else. So in a way, perhaps this whole co-branding explosion is actually a concentrated industrial effort by the titans of junk food and fast food to muscle smaller brands (and especially store-brand) items from menus and the aluminum storage racks? Sure, the consumer only sees a kooky Frankenfood when he or she gawps in wide-eyed disbelief at toaster pastries that taste like soft drinks or ice cream tubs glutted with diced up candy bar chunks from a competing brand,  but for the forgers of said co-branded items, the "novelty" items serve more of a strategic purpose as "gap-fillers" - i.e., all-too-expendable products that can be switched in and out quickly simply to maintain maximum occupancy of finite retail space. 

I don't know, maybe I'm reading way, way too much into this. That said, when multi-billion dollar industries and ferocious market competitors decide to "team up" for anything, that nonetheless should give you pause - if not outright concern - as an American consumer. Today, it's consolidation of Peeps and Oreos, tomorrow, it's consolidation of Nabisco and Just Born. Today, it's Cap'n Crunch Taco Bell balls, tomorrow, it's Yum Brands! merging with Quaker Oats (which, believe it or not, is actually owned by Pepsi.) Today it's Dunkin' Donuts flavored Pop-Tarts, tomorrow it's Kellogg's flat out purchasing Dunkin' Brands for a couple of billion smackers. And with the big huge mega super duper companies getting even bigger, that means the entry point for upstart brands is going to get even smaller and smaller, with the Goliath fast food/junk food brands gobbling up even more of the low culture comestible pie.

Now, you may take a gander at something like the Peeps-branded Oreos and simply call it silly synergy. But the way I see it, it very well could be a premonition of wide-scale brand acquisitions and corporate mergers on the horizon. This is how the world of Rollerball came about, I suppose: not with the sudden and startling consolidation of corporate interests, but with those eye-catching "novelty" co-brands that distracted us from the mass coadunation of our corporate overlords going on right under our noses ...

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A Round-Up of the Seasonal Foodstuffs of Halloween 2016!

Rip open 'em trick or treat bags, kiddos ... it's time for The Internet Is In America's annual retrospective on the wackiest, woolliest and weirdest limited-time-only comestibles of the Samhain season!

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

Each year, we here at The Internet Is In America wrap up our two months (give or take) of Halloween-ish content with an overview of all of the limited-time-only, seasonally-appropriate foods, drinks and hybrid comestibles (think, your werewolf-themed chewing gum) that graced our supermarket and big box store shelves since late August. Beyond being the most fitting way to bid the autumnal season farewell, it's pretty much the only way I can imagine saying farewell to Halloween now. I mean, what truly embodies the spirit of the holiday more than weird-ass stuff you're meant to turn into bile that's only available for about ten weeks out of the year, anyway?

Philosophically, I've always considered Halloween to represent much more than a single holiday. Indeed, it covers an entire quarter of the year, beginning with the last vestiges of summer (usually, when your local Target takes down the patio furniture and puts in the value-priced notebook and mechanical pencil displays) all the way up to Black Friday. It's that wondrous time of year where, oh-so-gradually, the weather transitions from being skin-blistering hot to bone-chillingly frigid. The sun slowly begins setting earlier and earlier each evening, to the point where it's practically pitch-black around 6 p.m. And the local foliage goes from bright green and nuclear yellow to crunchy brown and red ... before completely disintegrating from the trees themselves, leaving behind grey, spindly branches that reach out into the sky like skeletal hands. It's the most aesthetically ethereal time of year, so I suppose it only makes sense that its corresponding, mass marketed foodstuffs would port about the same desperate temporality.

And aye, as the calendar no doubt reminds you, the official Samhain season is just a few hours from ending. Before we bid Halloween 2016 adieu for good, what better way to commemorate the All Hallows' tomfoolery from the last few months than with a lengthy look back at the L-T-O, seasonally-thematic food stuffs that filled our bellies - and hearts - with so many terrific (and sometimes terrifying) memories? Grab a spoon and put on your most wistful rosy shades, folks: it's time to get sentimental through saturated fats ...

Pillsbury's Pumpkin Pie Toaster Strudel Pastries!

Now here is a holdover from last year I totally forgot about. I mean that literally - I found the thing in my freezer in March, apparently forgetting to give it a try back in Halloween-time '15. However, since the product was re-released this year, I suppose it's fair game, pending Pillsbury didn't radically overhaul the formula or anything like that. 

To the layman, these things just come across as wannabe Pop-Tarts. That's actually a gross oversight, since the two products are quite different. Whereas the toaster pastries that sometimes come in Justice League-flavored form are more or less hardened, sugary shells with artificially-flavored gunk in the middle, these offerings from Pillsbury are more like real pastries. As in, the shells are actually soggy and fluffy, and the inner creme is legit creme and not just glorified jelly. So, yeah, it might not exactly be a leap in quality from El Monterrey to Taco Bell, but it's probably comparable to the jump up from Totinos to Freschetta pizza.

And of course, you really can't have a toaster pastry without a shit ton of gooey, goopy, sugary gunk to slur down, and you get two pretty big plastic pouches of saccharine frosting to splash all over your struddle. In case you are wondering, yes, it is vanilla flavored, and also yes, it does look like dual IV drips filled to the brim with sperm. 

As you can no doubt see for yourself, these things are much, much flakier than Kellogg's competing breakfast product. I have a hard time thinking of anything to compare the taste and texture of the exterior shell to, but rest assured it is definitely warm, chewy and a little bit greasy. The inside filling, of course, is piping hot, and it's quite a bit smoother and pulpier than your standard Pop-Tarts innards. Whereas with Pop-Tarts you are basically eating crystallized jam, with Toaster Struddles it's more like you're eating actual paste - it's a tad too runny to be considered legitimate frosting, but it's certainly worlds more advanced than whatever the fuck Kellogg's is screwing around with, that's for sure. 

And for the overall product? Yes, it is good, very good. The weird combination of oily and sugary seems a bit off-putting at first, but by the time the frosting liquefies on the pastry's outer shell, you'll know your wrapping your lips around something very, very special. Now, does it taste like a real pumpkin pie? Of course it doesn't, but it does taste like a really great, really decadent dessert that's almost - almost - real-world bakery quality. Granted, it's still comparative trash when you put it up against the real stuff, but as far as junk food goes? You're definitely chowing down on some high-quality sleaze right here, buck-o. 

Pecan Pie M&Ms!

Pretty much every year, there is some new M&Ms product that vaguely ties into Halloween by attempting to ape a popular seasonal flavor - i.e., pumpkin spice, candy corn, etc. Well, give the guys at M&M Corp. some credit, because they definitely managed to think outside the box with this iteration (which, I have heard, was a L-T-O item released last year, but I didn't see them anywhere in my neck of the woods.) Thinking one holiday ahead, the head honchos at M&Ms decided to give us an offering that tackles one of the less imitated autumnal sweet stuffs - good old fashion pecan pie. 

Now going into this, I was well aware that it was going to be IMPOSSIBLE for the M&Ms to taste anything at all like real pecan pie (which, in my humblest o' opinions, is pretty much the undiluted black tar heroin of Thanksgiving staples, due in part to its ultra-addictive qualities.) That said, they REALLY got the scent down ... as soon as I ripped open the bag and caught a whiff, I could've sworn I was at the dinner table, getting ready to cram 18 pounds of mashed potatoes and turkey gizzards down my throat hole while sitting beside somebody I've seen every late November for the last 14 years, but whose name completely escapes me. 

To be fair, the brown, yellow and white color scheme is a bit on the boring side, and while the candies do indeed smell like a freshly baked pecan pie, the overall product just doesn't do that well of a job mimicking the idiosyncratic flavor it oh so desperately seeks to ape. It's one of the better M&M permutations to hit the aisles in a while, but sadly, I can't really say these suckers blew my proverbial socks metaphorically off. 

...although I GOTS to admit, finding a couple of mutated, Siamese twin M&Ms in the bag definitely made me a happy camper. I mean, what's more Halloween than eating the milk-chocolate-coated equivalent of the monster from Basket Case? That's right, fuckin' nothin'.

Ruffles All Dressed Potato Chips!

Yeah, I guess I am kinda' cheating referring to this as a "Halloween" food, but you know, it nonetheless fits into the whole "autumnal limited-time-only" mold. I mean, the national emblem of Canada is a maple leaf, and we all know those motherfuckers are crispiest when? That's right, fall, and don't pretend it isn't a coincidence (or me desperately grasping for proverbial straws) neither.  

So what does "All Dressed" mean, in Canadian potato chip vernacular? While, it means the chips - concurrently - taste vinegary, sugary and whatever the fuck you call what BBQ chips taste like. Hell, and here I was thinking it was just some marketer's sneaky way of getting around calling the things "Poutine-flavored."

So yeah, aesthetically, there ain't much at all to talk about. They look like your standard potato chips, only slightly more polite, because they are Canadian. And I have to commend their cordiality - I spent a good half hour screaming "Bret screwed Bret!" and "Gordon Lightfoot sucks dick" at the bag, and not once did it ever yell anything back at me. 

All kidding aside, what do the chips ACTUALLY taste like? Well, it's basically what would happen if you chowed down on a salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion and BBQ chip simultaneously. I certainly wouldn't call it a melodious combination of flavors, but all those jumbled tastes weren't at all combative. I wouldn't go as far as to say the multitude of flavors "gelled," but by that same token, it also didn't taste like an absolute clusterfuck of seasonings. In that, I suppose you could say these chips are very much like Canada itself - just sort of OK, but nothing worth going out of your way to experience. 

 Starbucks' Chile Mocha Frappuccino!

Seeing as how Starbucks is pretty much single-handedly responsible for the proliferation of "pumpkin spice" as a ubiquitous, nigh-inescapable fall flavor, you have to give them some credit for trying something wildly different in 2016. Their great "successor" to the PSL, and in turn, quite possibly the next big thing in autumnal, limited-time-only foodstuffs? Why, what else, motherfucking cayenne pepper!

Yeah, I was skeptical at first, too. While this unorthodox medley of cinnamon, nutmeg and lip-tingling pepper is no match for the chain's seasonal heavy hitters (that salt caramel frappe thing is pretty much the goddamn greatest thing I've ever put in my mouth), it's nowhere near as weird-tasting as you'd expect it to be. In fact, it tastes like your usual vanilla milkshake/coffee hybrid, except for the occasional pangs of pain on your tongue that makes you wonder if you are developing herpes. 

So yeah, I'm afraid we'll have to relegate this one to the island of "it sounded good at the time" ideas, where it will no doubt spend its golden years shooting the breeze with Pepsi Paradise Mango and that one Halloween Whopper that had the unadvertised bonus of turning your turds neon teal. 

Pumpkin Spice Cheerios!

Admittedly, it's pretty hard to get too excited about Cheerios, no matter how Halloween-y the gimmick. Yes, even with the pumpkin dressings, we're still dealing with fucking circles, and honestly, just how many words can you right about characteristic-less oval cereal bits?

Well, what I can say is that the pumpkin spice aroma is strong with this one. Indeed, as soon as you open the bag, it smells like a gaggle of early 20-something suburban white girls who would never fuck you despite the fact they are fives out of tens at best have exploded in your kitchen. And yes, that entails just as much syrupy and sticky cinnamon and nutmeg flakes as you'd imagine.

I guess the cereal tastes like pumpkin spice, although by this point, I've eaten so much artificially pumpkin-spiced stuff that I genuinely have no idea what real pumpkin is supposed to taste like anymore. On the whole, I'd chalk this one up is a fairly ho-hum little offering - yes, it's edible and it isn't really unappetizing, but considering you can get a family-sized box of Boo Berry for the same price, what's the point?

Reese's Halloween Printed Cups!

By now, Reese's has pretty much done everything financially feasible to capitalize on the Halloween season. After shaping your marquee product like both chocolate and orange pumpkins, there's really not a lot of holiday-appropriate spherical things left to work with, after all. Alas, the fine folks Reese's Corp. have come up with a pretty clever work around this year. Taking a cue from Nabisco, they decided to imprint All Hallows' Eve iconography on their staple product, and the results, if I may say so myself, are pretty dadgum impressive. 

First off, don't let the above photo fool you. While the wrappers above appear Denver Broncos-colored, the actually packaging is a fairly dark blue. I've no clue what the proprietary wrapping does to light, but every time I fired off a snap shot I kept losing the indigo complexion. So even if the candies themselves are subpar, at least I have the whole "the outer package is kind of a miniature black hole" hook to run with, I suppose. 

Gustatorily, there is nothing at all to talk about here. Regardless of the engravings, the products taste like your run of the mill Reese's Cups, and there's no other wacky gimmick, like orange cookie bits inside the chocolate or any of that kind of noise. what you do get, however, is a nice menagerie of stereotypical Halloween images in edible, chocolate-and-peanut-butter form. The craftsmanship on my candies were very, very good, and I absolutely loved the quasi-squiggly character design. It's a tough call choosing my favorite, but if I had to, I'd narrowly choose the little ghosty guy over the facsimile of a jack-o'-lantern visage ... although, like I said, it's a really, really tough call. 

 Our Specialty's Sweet Middles Pumpkin Spice Mini Desserts!

Long-time Great American Cookies patrons will no doubt recognize these "pumpkin sweet middles" treats. Sure, they may go by a different namesake and they may not be as big as GAC's proprietary snack, but these suckers are Double Doozies - albeit, significantly scaled down Double Doozies - all the same. 

Like a good 99 percent of the people reading this, I am not exactly familiar with the Our Specialty brand. Some off the clock sleuthing revealed it's a subsidiary of some Buffalo, N.Y. based company called "Rich's Products," and what do you know, their, ahem, "Specialty" is high-end, cream cheese filled sandwich cookies. How they ended up being retailed in a Publix grocery store in Atlanta in late September is beyond me, but all I can say is thank goodness we got our batch down here. 

These things are just fucking delicious in every possible way you can think of describing a pastry as delicious. The exterior cookies strike the perfect balance between spongy and squishy and crunchy and crumbly, and sweet Jesus, that interior creme is what I imagine heaven tastes like. I know it can often be a hassle navigating your way through the bakery section of your local grocer, but if you see these things anywhere near you, grab them and start eating them right then and there in the aisle. They are THAT good, and probably worth getting arrested for. Well, probably, anyway.

 Caramel Apple Pop-Tarts!

Come on, now. Did you honestly expect to make it through the Halloween season without Kellogg's throwing out some kind of weird, quasi-seasonally appropriate variation of its toaster pastry staple? Well, the 2016 joint is "frosted caramel apple," which means next year, it's almost guaranteed that we'll be celebrating Halloween '17 by eating candy-corn-flavored Tarts.

Keeping with the brand's millennial/hipster marketing battle plan, the back of the packaging contains a number of incredibly not funny cartoons. But at least they don't advocate suicide, as was the case of last spring's watermelon-flavored permutation.

In terms of sheer aesthetics, I really liked the exterior Tart shell. There's just something about that neon green zigzag pattern that reminds me of some of the girls of ill-refute I dated during my man-ho days in college. Honestly, I can't tell you how many hoochies I've seen with toe nails that looked just like the breakfast pastries above. And hell, some of them didn't even paint 'em ... their nails just looked naturally trashy. 

But as soon as you wedge these sumbitches into your toaster oven, something rather queer happens. For whatever reason, the jelly inside the Tart expands while it is being heated, which nearly caused my pastries to explode during the cooking process. As a result, I get a really weird pocket of film right in the middle of my Tart, which - naturally - exploded like a preservative-filled geyser as soon as I punctured the top coat. Maybe it was just an aberration, or maybe - just maybe - the shit inside of this thing is the fuckin' Blob. 

But taste-wise, I really can't complain. It wasn't as flavorful as, say, the maple bacon variation that hit store shelves earlier this year, but overall, it did have a fairly nice, semi-fruity flavor. Does it taste like a caramel apple? Well, not really, but it does taste like a halfway decent, chocolatey jam, and really, who would ever take offense to something like that?

Mayfield Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream!

Even if the ice cream itself wasn't any good, this thing would get an A plus in my book simply based on the packaging artwork. Most companies just would've painted the bucket orange and maybe toss a Jack O Lantern in the background, but the fine folks at Mayfield took it two steps beyond and put an entire harvesting mural on both sides of the product, complete with an anthropomorphic horse farmer that I find utterly terrifying for reasons I cannot adequately explain.

Probably my favorite thing about the product is its hue. Maybe my rods and cones aren't firing on all cylinders, but I have NO clue how to describe the color of this stuff. It's not really white, but it's not really orange or brown either. Instead, it takes up residence in that weird interphase between all three tones, perhaps making this seasonal dairy treat the first recorded appearance of what I call "whibrorange" in human history. 

By and large, the product is basically (get it?) a Starbucks PSL in a more congealed, less drinkable form. Thankfully, the ice cream does indeed taste more like pumpkin pie than the standard pumpkin spice gyp of cinnamon and nutmeg, and on the whole, I'd consider the overall quality of the product to be at least as good as Dairy Queen's Pumpkin Pie Blizzard ... if not even better, since you don't have shards of pumpkin pie filling that taste and feel like super sharp sunflower seed shells scraping across your mucus membranes. 

Because you just can't market a regular old ice cream anymore, the product does come with a few chunks of pumpkin pie crust. Essentially, they are just fragments of graham crackers that reside somewhere between "super duper crunchy and crispy" and "really soggy and flavorless." Really, it's a crap shoot every time you scoop up a piece - sometimes, you get a sliver of deliciousness and others, you almost want to spit out your spoonful because you have no idea what the hell it is you are running your tongue across. 

Pumpkin Spice Twinkies!

There's usually at least one seasonally thematic Twinkies variation on store shelves no matter the holiday, and you knew Hostess would be bringing its "A" game come Halloween time. Enter the most obvious thing in the history of anything being obvious, folks - the pumpkin spice Twinkies!

So aesthetically, there ain't much to talk about here. As far as exterior dressings are concerned, these things are virtually indistinguishable from your standard creme-filled sponge cake. Same plastic wrapper, same flaky golden hue, same everything, really. But as soon as you snap these little sumbitches in half, though...

...bam, it's a pumpkin spice latte explosion in your olfactory glands, you motherfucker! Indeed, the inner filling of the product smells incredibly pumpkin-pie-like, which you initially kind of want to write off as some sort of miracle of modern food science pioneering by Hostess, until you remember that one part in Fast Food Nation about that one lab in New Jersey that's already chemically engineered, patented and sold of every kind of artificial flavor and smell you can think of. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the fine folks at International Flavors & Fragrances were behind the surprisingly authentic pumpkin spice aroma in all of the artificially flavored pumpkin pie delicacies discussed throughout this article. 

OK, so it smells pumpkin spicy, but does it really taste like a PSL wrapped around a spongy snack cake? Well, a little, but it's more of that old "cinnamon and nutmeg" two-fer than it is the quasi-authentic pumpkin pie flavor and mouthfeel you'd get out of something like the Mayfield ice cream discussed a few graphs back. Also, you really can't tell in the photo above, but the creme itself is this weird grey hue. It's just about the most inedible looking color you could paint anything, and though I understand Hostess' decision to dye the proprietary goop a different shade to commemorate the holiday, it's definitely an aesthetic that makes you double think pushing it down your gullet. Tsk, tsk, Hostess ... couldn't you have just made it orange or brown or some other tone that doesn't make us think, you know, lead poisoning?

Starbucks Frappula Frappuccino!

And this year, we definitely save the best for last. Granted, the Frappula (which I always erroneously describe as the "Fappula" whenever I order it) is actually a return L-T-O offering from Halloween '15, but seeing as how it came out so late in the game (seriously, it didn't drop until the week of Oct. 31), we never really had ample time to get pumped for the product. And since it was discontinued just a few days after being introduced, word of mouth, unfortunately, never really circulated about just how fucking awesome this thing is. Needless to say, that same mistake WASN'T to be repeated this Halloween. 

Although the Starbucks marketing brass would never come out and directly state it in their advertising materials, the drink is clearly intended to represent the victim of a particularly nasty vampire attack. The foamy vanilla/marshmallow fluff mixture is obviously a stand-in for a milk-white neck, with the strawberry puree pulp representing copious blood flow from the fatal Dracula wound. (I'm still working it out, but I think the mocha sauce at the very bottom of the cup is supposed to signify the earthen tomb from which the bloodsucking undead have escaped.) I mean, just think about it - Starbucks has actually designed, focus tested and given the green light to a seasonal beverage whose entire "gimmick," so to speak, is that it's a liquefied homicide victim. Try all you goddamn may, it's going to be a LONG time before anybody comes up with a Halloween-themed foodstuff more hardcore than that.

And of course, the whole she-bang is topped off by a big, poofy splotch of whipped cream, which, uh, I guess is kind of like those frilly Austin Powers shirts all the vampires in those fruity Hammer movies used to wear. OK, so it doesn't tie into the whole "drinkable murdered corpse" motif as well as the other ingredients, but hey, whipped cream is still pretty fucking awesome, isn't it?

I honestly can't say enough good things about this beverage. I mean, it's one thing to make a food product with a really kooky Halloween gimmick (why, hello Burger King!), but to make one that also doubles as a kind of a drinkable abstract art is taking it to a whole other level. Just watching all of the colors swirl together is truly a sight to behold - it's like a creamy, chocolaty lava lamp or a recreation of Jupiter's atmosphere with strawberry pulp. More so than any other seasonal tie-in foodstuff I tried over the last couple months, nothing reminds me of that wonderful, wondrous and all-too-brief spell we call Halloween than this ingenuous, semi-morbid and extraordinarily gustatorily satisfying milkshake/iced coffee hybrid tribute to Nosferatu. It's the absolute epitome of everything that makes Halloween so damned great - it's gross, and tacky, and extravagant and excessive and hyper-visual and it just feels so incredibly interconnected with the times. And alike Halloween itself, it ain't going to be around for much longer. Pay heed, folks - if you haven't experienced the Frappula by now, you've still got a couple of hours left to right the autumnal wrongs. And in that, not only is it the perfect way to wrap up the All Hallows' season, in my eyes, it's the ONLY proper way to bid Halloween 2016 adieu. 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM THE INTERNET IS IN AMERICA!!!

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