it’s come to this. yes folks, i am stock-piling pop tarts.
last month, i was alerted to the woeful news that frosted pop tarts are no longer allowed into australia. pop tarts haven’t been widely available for a while, but you could always count on specialist retailers or david jones food hall for small-scale imports. no more. the gelatin used in the frosting is believed by the guys in the quarantine department to be an agent for mad cow disease, so there.
i’d had usafoods.com.au bookmarked for a while now, though i hadn’t ever placed an order. now seemed like a good time to try them out. their supply of frosted pop tarts was already running low, so in a fit of mild panic, i got a box of eight frosted blueberry pop tarts, and a box of 12 frosted s’mores pop tarts. in their newsletter (where the news of impending frosted pop tart drought was broke), usafoods had helpfully suggested that a cheaper and fresher tasting substitute was toast ’em pop ups, so i got a box of those as well.
research, you understand.
so this carton showed up in the mail room a few days ago, and the kid and i immediately leapt into action and hustled an after-school snack. here before us we have a blueberry pop tart and a strawberry pop-up. pretty much identical, in their stay-fresh foil wrappers, like hapless adventurers wrapped up in emergency blankets, no? little snacky cakes, this is where your adventure ends!
and were they the same? well, the kid kept referring to her strawberry toaster pastry as “pop tart”, so i’ll say: yes. even i couldn’t really tell the difference. side by side, the toast ’em does look more “picture perfect”, with its smooth biscuit and non-bleedy sprinkles, but essentially both are crunchy pastry envelopes filled with sticky, almost-fruit jam, adorned with a shell of hard icing. mmm… i wouldn’t normally have picked strawberry flavour, but it came in the bumper toast ’ems assortment box, alongside frosted apple and frosted brown sugar cinnamon.
it’s a damn shame one of the selection wasn’t “frosted cherry”, which is my favourite. it kills me — so unfair — that this development (regression?) occurs just as pop tarts world opens its doors in NYC. and what can you buy at pop tarts world? frosted cherry pop tart flavoured lip balm!
how’s that for a first world problem?
11 Comments
ooh ive seen the toast ’ems and was waiting until i find every last leftover box of normal poptarts but nice to know they will be there waiting for my inevitable embrace.
if only this happened last year (the regression and the store opening) – i could have brought you a box AND the lip balm. so when is the next trip happening… next year?
i must check if the poptarts i brought back (after not having finished the boxes while in nyc) have been thrown out.
suze: usafoods is having a 3-for-$10 deal on newly expired frosted blueberry pop tarts. that’s 3 x 8 tarts. do it! and then eat them really quickly!
deborah: haha. i don’t know if it’ll happen next year. maybe the year after? still, you never know…
hey, you should sell your leftover pop tarts to suze! 😉
i’m petitioning for next year. ahem.
and, you could totally DIY when your current stash runs out: http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/04/homemade-pop-tarts/
You sounded just like my kid sister in this post! She tends to stockpile Pop-Tarts because they aren’t readily available in this part of the world. Supermarkets that stock them usually carry only two flavors: cinnamon-sugar and blueberry – and this leads to some serious s’more and frosted cherry panic buying on my sister’s part.
what! does this mean i can’t even mail them to you because they’ll be confiscated? what if they are unfrosted? oh wait. then they’d be yuck. i just saw pop tart twists and pop tart blitz today, too. there’s also a supposedly “healthy” poptart under the unappetizingly-named-but-not-so-bad fiber one label. could i send those??
oh dude. i forgot, i think we still have the DULCE DE LECHE pop tarts available
deborah. are you petitioning me, or LJ? HA HA. maybe by the time we are ready to go, there will be a pop tarts hotel!! yeah!!
i actually already have a recipe for pop tarts bookmarked, but don’t know if i’ll ever get round to making them. maybe in a couple of years, for a school fund-raising bakesale. or something. interested?
midge: mmmyes. s’mores and cherry frosted are the best flavours. i think the most common ones here are the chocolatey flavours, which i assume will be fine, but boring. see, i haven’t even tried buying a boring choc one to see if it will be ok. 😉
santos. “yuck” is completely the correct adjective for unfrosted! sometimes i just refer to them as the “healthy” ones. even the kid won’t touch them. fiber one is very intriguing! i have just googled them, and they look as though they are some sort of laxative device. omg. that packaging is so adult-contemporary! 😀
ahem. BOTH of you 😉
sunday it was mebe. last night was mebe not. sigh.
the BA recipe looks very doable. i think i have about 12 tablespoons of a certain preserve leftover too. HMMMMM…
The gelatine used in the frosting can be an agent for mad cow disease? Wow, that’s a shame. Unfrosted Pop Tarts ain’t Pop Tarts at all! It’s like buying a Big Mac without the beef patty.
whaaaaaaaaaat?????? Boo to quarantine denying us deliciously naughty pastries. Thanks for the heads-up.