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.
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.
