Name: Hostess Birthday Cupcakes
Made in: USA
Bought in: USA
Weight: 46g per cake, 8 pack

In the UK, Hostess are mainly known for Twinkies – the small log shaped cakes filled with some sort of ill defined sugary whipped “cream”. However their history is much richer than this, and the Hostess CupCake was supposedly the first commercially produced cup cake.

I first came across these in their natural habitat, a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard (The sun was not yet up, so I was having fun). They were yellow. Maybe they were lemon flavoured. I don’t really remember because the overriding flavour of these cakes is obviously sugar.

Now I quite like these. All the individual parts are not sickly in themselves, but together, they give quite the sugar hit. They middle is a fluffy meringue type stuff – on its own it has little flavour, and the product does contain egg white so it might even be a form of meringue.

One of the best things is that it’s described as yellow cake on the box. I still refuse to believe that yellow cake is a real thing, mainly because a former American boss got so much ridicule from us one day because yellow isn’t a flavour.

When you open each individual package, you get that strong artificial vanilla flavour, as though they were made with Market Pantry Imitation Vanilla Flavor. Tasting them – there’s less vanilla, but still they taste like birthday cake. In fact they may be perfect birthday cake. The sprinkles are real and colourful, the flavour is brilliant and while the filling would be more birthday cake if it was buttercream, it still fulfills the brief brilliantly.

The only slight problem is that I suspect I could say everything above except the sprinkles about most of the CupCakes line. Maybe not the chocolate ones. But in this case I’ll let them off.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cake-o-meter: 🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂