Monday, January 2, 2012

Hungry Jack Funfetti Buttermilk Pancakes

Well, it's happened. The internet's obsession with combining the crap out of various foodstuffs has seeped out, like a spilled red velvet cupcake fudge milkshake onto a white Maud Sienna carpet, staining the world of brands as we know it. Yes, Virginia, there are now Funfetti-flavored pancakes, Funfetti being the socially acceptable way to literally eat candy with candy. And I have eaten them and lived to tell the tale.
Hungry Jack, the company that brought you breakfast by Dad on school days when Mom was busy and the Australian Burger King now offers up an easy pack of pancakes dotted with the perennial birthday party favorite, sprinkles. Visually, these look like the calling card of a rogue, murderous IHOP employee on a quest for vengeance. I'll call him Murray the Pancakinator. They're upsettingly neon with a lazy heaviness to them, a density that emcompasses a mental weight far beyond sprinkles and pancake mix.
The mix, which could double for a My Little Pony recreational club drug, ballooned from a scant two cups to like, thirty cups of gloopy batter a result of sitting out on the counter for five minutes while the stove heated up. The first few pancakes were pretty and evenly speckled with sprinkles, while the remaining pancakes took on a dingy grey tinge, the result of the sprinkles melting together like a cheap watercolor set.
After cooking, the result was fairly underwhelming from an edible perspective. Funfetti is just another way to add delicious sugar and birthday colors into an already sugary edible, the cupcake. When you take the sugar out, in the case of the pancake mix, you're basically eating the poor man's Funfetti. And man, is it awful- the flavor is chalky with no sweetness to speak of outside of a few sharp little pockets of astringency from eating straight up sprinkles. The heaviness from the batter translated poorly to the pancakes. Each one was leathery on the outside with a burnt flavor, despite being a perfect golden brown color, and had a doughy chew to them.
But there are options. Yes, there is always a plan B, in this case, B for Birthday Massacre. Also known as, BM. In true Buddy the Elf fashion, we pimped out these pancakes with three different kinds of frosting, butter, syrup, and powdered sugar. We even garnished them with candy canes because we are literally sugar pimps. And you know what? Despite looking like clown vomit, they tasted pretty darn good. The excessive amounts of sugar definitely gave it a more cake-like flavor, which made sense being that it contained all the components of a cake but fried in a pan, and even moistened the dry little suckers up to make for a fairly manageable one bite before we and everyone in a three mile radius contracted diabetes.
So, the moral of the story is this: when you have a product that tastes like sand, copious amounts of frosting and food coloring will prevent it from being bland. Or so the saying goes. Honestly, the real moral of the story is that it's never good to trust $1 pancake mix, even if it does seem to be a small price to pay for sugary childhood memories.
It does get a point for value- it used water and nothing else and yielded nine medium-sized pancakes, but when that value roundhouse kicks your health and dental insurance plan in the stomach, you begin to realize that your money would be better spent hiring a psychiatrist to unbox your childhood instead of pancakes. But on the plus side, #fuckyeahrainbowpancakes!
Seriously, don't do it.

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