Charms Fluffy Stuff Spider Web Cotton Candy

Two Halloween-related food posts in a row? INCONCEIVABLE!

I con­sid­ered sav­ing this review for my offi­cial Count­down to Hal­loween series of posts, which won’t begin until next Mon­day, but then I decided that this infor­ma­tion was too impor­tant not to share as soon as pos­si­ble. (Feel free to skip ahead to my ver­dict , which I’m con­sid­er­ing a pub­lic ser­vice announcement.)

This past week­end I was itch­ing to spend some of my birth­day money on cheap, dis­pos­able crap I don’t need but des­per­ately want, so nat­u­rally I hit up the toy store and candy store where I spot­ted  Charms Fluffy Stuff Spi­der Web Cot­ton Candy.

(Sorry, I didn’t have any excit­ing Halloween-appropriate back­drops to use in these pho­tos, but I did have these black plas­tic paper plate hold­ers which kind of remind me of spiderwebs–if spi­der­webs were black, per­fectly round, and dish­washer and microwave-safe.)

I gen­er­ally love cot­ton candy, even though it’s one of those “some­times foods” that the reha­bil­i­tated Cookie Mon­ster preaches about to mol­ly­cod­dled chil­dren nowa­days (a video which warms my heart to know has more dis­likes than likes) BECAUSE DIABEETUS. How­ever, I’ve never had sour apple-flavored cot­ton candy, let alone sour apple-flavored cot­ton candy that’s made to resem­ble spi­der webs, so that’s all the pur­chase incen­tive I needed.

And hey, it’s fat-free. That’s some­thing, I guess.

There was also this omi­nous warn­ing about not plac­ing the bag in direct sun­light, which I assume is there to pre­vent the con­tents from hatch­ing and unleash­ing a sce­nario like Arachno­pho­bia upon the world. Or it could just be to pre­vent the sugar from melting.

I’m used to cot­ton candy being on a stick. I quickly dis­cov­ered that one does not sim­ply shake cot­ton candy out of a bag:

Even­tu­ally it wig­gled out in two big clumps. I decided the clumps looked noth­ing like spi­der webs other than being white, which was kind of dis­ap­point­ing. I don’t really know what I expected, to be hon­est. Charms wisely declined to show an accom­pa­ny­ing photo of the prod­uct on the bag, pre­sum­ably because it can eas­ily be mis­taken for a con­gealed mass of cot­ton balls. I added a spi­der to make myself feel bet­ter about it.

Not a ter­ri­bly real­is­tic spi­der, I know, but then nei­ther is the con­cept of a sour apple-flavored cot­ton candy spi­der web. And if any kind of spi­der can weave such a web, I imag­ine it would be a flam­boy­antly gay one that went a lit­tle too crazy with the BeDaz­zler .

I attempted to treat the Fluffy Stuff as if it were fake, dec­o­ra­tive spi­der web­bing that you can stretch out and drape over fur­ni­ture and stuff, but all I accom­plished was get­ting sticky white shit all over my fingers.

By this point I was pretty dis­ap­pointed that Spi­der Web Cot­ton Candy was seem­ing more awe­some as a premise than as an actual prod­uct. It looks noth­ing like spi­der webs and despite my best efforts, I couldn’t make it behave like spi­der webs either. But I was still opti­mistic that it would taste good–it would HAVE to taste good, right?

Now, before I tell you how it tasted, I want you to under­stand some­thing: I love sour stuff. Per­haps not the Toxic Waste level of sour, but Sour Patch Kids, War­heads, and sim­i­lar can­dies are all things I enjoy. I’ve been known to lick the sour crys­tals off sour gummy worms. Whiskey Sours are my go-to bar drink at wed­ding recep­tions. But I sim­ply can­not endorse the fla­vor of Spi­der Web Cot­ton Candy–and believe me, I wanted to. I needed some­thing to believe in after such a dis­ap­point­ing hands-on experience.

The short version:

It tastes like ass.

Oh sure, it tastes like sour apple too. But also ass.

Ide­ally you should be able to enjoy cot­ton candy by the hand­ful, stuff­ing large fluffy pieces into your mouth that quickly dis­solve on the tongue and flood your taste buds with a burst of pleas­ant fla­vor. Spi­der Web Cot­ton Candy, how­ever, I could barely tol­er­ate even in tiny pieces. It’s almost so sour that it burns your tongue, espe­cially if you pinch off more than a small thimble-sized bite.

The prob­lem, I think, is that cot­ton candy just isn’t a good vehi­cle for such a bold fla­vor as Sour Apple. The del­i­cate, quick-to-melt nature of cot­ton candy, which is very dif­fer­ent from, say, gum­mies or hard candy, means your tongue is bom­barded with too much sour too quickly. But just to be sure it wasn’t just me, I also forced–yes, forced!–my boyfriend to try it.

We both made faces like this:

Never again.

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