I really wanted this to work out. At $2.49 for a bag of 20, the price is unbeatable. And I have many fond childhood memories of another Hostess chocolate product, the Ho Ho, which is a log made from rolled-up layers of synthetic chocolate and cream. I consumed hundreds of Ho Hos over the years while a student at Alice Gustafson Elementary School. They cost 40 cents back then and came in a flimsy foil wrapper that could not be opened without causing the various layers of the Ho Ho to crumble and separate.
But mostly what I loved about the Ho Ho was the Hostess corporation's supercharged and totally synthetic take on the flavors and textures of cream and chocolate cake. It was as though a mad scientist had tried a cake made normally with natural ingredients and then reconstructed the whole thing from memory with laboratory chemicals in a test tube.
After refrigerating the donettes overnight (a crucial step you cannot omit if you want the frosting to harden into a nice, tasty shell), I opened the bag and was immediately overpowered by that familiar Hostess artificial chocolate smell. So fake! So sweet! So strong! So wrong! It was the gustatory equivalent of hearing "The Flight of The Bumblebee" shrieked into your ear by an insane little piccolo.
At once, countless grade school memories came flooding back to me: the manadatory rope climbing in gym class, the food fights, the violent recess free-for-alls that went under the name of "rugby," the thinly disguised insults volleyed during "creative writing hour," the special group I had to attend every Wednesday afternoon that was supposedly for gifted students but which I always secretly suspected was actually some form of group therapy for the criminally retarded. I remembered how my creepy, perpetually angry fourth grade teacher had a nervous breakdown and was replaced by a kindly substitute who once brought her shaggy black dog to class, and we spent all day playing with the dog instead of learning.
It was a Proustian melange of triumphs and traumas, all rolled together like the layers of the selfsame Ho Ho whose cloying, burnt-sweet smell was virtually identical to that of the frosted donettes to which we now return our attention. So: there the donettes were. Twenty donettes in a bag, of which I had three or four. Each was more disappointing than the last. The chocolate frosting never properly hardened into a crisp shell the way the Entenmann's frosting does. Instead, the frosting and the donut cake all took on the same rubbery texture. And the aftertaste was simply horrid, like sucking on a penny.
You cannot go home again, people. It is as simple as that.
August 10, 2008
Hostess Frosted Donettes
