Kellogg’s Limited Edition Pop-Tarts: Soft and Chewy Gingerbread

Acquired by: retail purchase at local supermarket

Price: $2.50 on sale for a box of 12 Pop-Tarts

Rating: 1 out of 5

Nowadays, every major brand on the market feels a need to make limited editions of their products. We get short-lived, special editions of candy bars, cereals, soft drinks, and even winter-themed snack crackers.

Now, the folks at Kellogg’s have decided that their plain old Pop-Tarts aren’t good enough to get us through winter. No, we need special, winter-themed Pop-Tarts. And so they’ve introduced these Limited Edition Pop-Tarts in the Soft and Chewy Gingerbread flavor.

Winter-themed, I said. Seems no one is bold enough to attempt a Christmas-themed, or even a generic “holiday” themed, product. Kellogg’s, in their infinite wisdom, has chosen to take a flavor inextricably associated with Christmas - gingerbread - and use it, and the image of gingerbread men and women, in an attempt to create a Pop-Tart theme that offends no one.

As always, please click on any image to see a larger version.

On opening the interior packages (each housing two Pop-Tarts), I found pasty-looking rectangles. If these are gingerbread, they used a very light recipe - I normally expect more color. For the festive element on these limited edition pastries, images of gingerbread men or women engaging in some winter activity have been applied with a printing process that uses FD & C approved food colorings.

The images are inoffensive enough, but so crudely printed that it’s hard to tell what they are. The bumpy pastry surface, and the dusting of sugar over all, don’t help. I stared at the picture of a gingerbread woman on the right for the longest time and still can’t figure out what she is supposed to be carrying, or what those curvy green lines behind her are supposed to be.

Kellogg’s claims on the box that there are “50 possible images!” to be found within. Maybe it’s just me - maybe I just coincidentally got the lamest ones in the bunch. But the first Pop-Tart I ate? A picture of a gingerbread man operating a snowblower. How festive!

A key component of any Pop-Tart is the filling. A key element for any gingerbread man is the icing defining his clothing and facial features. Kellogg’s, then, naturally put the icing inside the Pop-Tarts as the filling.

Ultimately, the proof in any food, whether a limited edition or not, is in the eating. Pop-Tarts have always been meant to be edible either unheated, or toasted.

I tried a “raw” Pop-Tart first. And immediately regretted it. Granted, on the box itself they’d told me to expect “Soft and Chewy Gingerbread”. What I didn’t expect was something that felt like half-baked cookie dough in my mouth. Where the icing filling came into play, it only enhanced the gummy nature of the raw Pop-Tart.

Following the instructions on the box (”Warm pastry in toasting appliance at lowest or lightest heat setting for one heating cycle only.”), I prepared a pair of toasted Pop-Tarts. The result? They now tasted like warm, half-baked cookie dough.

Once upon a time, in a less litigious world, Pop-Tarts was okay with people actually getting their product truly toasted in their “toasting appliances”. That’s how I’ve always preferred my Pop-Tarts - with a little crispiness added by using toasters for the purpose for which they were intended - to toast.

Since crispiness was distinctly lacking here, I decided to take a chance that Kellogg’s hadn’t included any surveillance equipment in the Pop-Tarts box, or that they weren’t going to send their Toasting Appliance Police to arrest me for defying the official instructions. I put a pair of Gingerbread Pop-Tarts into my toaster oven, turned the dial to Medium, and pushed the button.

A minute or so later, I had two nicely crisped Pop-Tarts. One, though, had cracked across one end, and the smaller piece was starting to fall through the rack in my oven. I pulled everything out with my toaster tongs, allowed the tarts to cool briefly, and took a bite.

Here, finally, we’d gotten past the half-baked cookie dough texture. What I had in my mouth instead felt like a lightly crispy cookie, properly baked, and with the interesting addition of a layer of icing sandwiched inside.

The recipe that Kellogg’s used for their gingerbread pastry has enough spices in it to have a tiny, almost unnoticeable but definitely there, bite. Unfortunately, it didn’t have enough spices to truly taste like gingerbread. I also couldn’t detect the flavor of molasses anywhere in the mix, which is an essential ingredient in most gingerbread recipes I’ve seen.

The entire assembly of flavors and textures failed to come together to make a pastry that I would ever buy again. To make these Gingerbread Pop-Tarts work, they should have had the texture of a crisp gingerbread cookie. Instead, they came up with a recipe that tasted half-baked, with an unpleasant chewy texture - and then tried to sell it as “Soft and Chewy Gingerbread”. Sorry, Kellogg’s - this is one time you can’t turn a bug into a feature.

Even when I defied the instructions and toasted the tarts until crispy, the flavors didn’t come up to reasonable standards for gingerbread cookies - rich, spicy flavors, with the cool sweetness of icing on top.

In the final analysis, I wouldn’t buy these again - and I wouldn’t recommend them to my readers. Unless you actually like under-spiced, half-baked gingerbread dough.

Related Links:

• Kellogg’s - www2.kelloggs.com