What's that you're eating?

"What is it?"

"One of Green Lantern's giant, glowing balls."

No, seriously. This:



is food.

Last year, I read In Defense of Food, and one of the tips the book gave on eating better was not to buy or eat anything that your great-grandmother would not recognize as food. This snack cake, a marketing ploy between DC Comics and Hostess:



is probably that author's worst nightmare. Geeky internet readers, on the other hand, have been buzzing about these cakes for at least a week, and given:

1) My inherent geeky nature
2) My love of comics

and

3) My love of high fructose corn syrup I totally had to seek these out.

I finally found them tonight, and I brought a box home to photograph, dissect, eat, and judge. It's almost like I bought these for science, not just because I like cake and comic books and would jump at the chance to combine the two and shove them into my mouth. So, what did I learn?

Hostess GloBalls are disgusting.

On the plus side, they actually do look like something Green Lantern might create with his ring:



On the minus side, instead of being filled with Justice League members, the GloBalls are filled with a dry, stale cupcake beneath a layer of marshmallow that's roughly the consistency of rubber sealant:



As an overweight person with a lifelong history of eating junkfood and things that are bad for me, I can assure you that this was the worst snack cake that I have ever eaten. It doesn't even taste like anything! It's a flavorless mouthful of dry sawdust cake floating in squishy creme and surrounded by a hunk of equally flavorless marshmallow that you have to gnaw through and then somehow manage to grind to death between your molars just so that you can swallow it without dying.

I'm now trying to decide which of my enemies to give the rest of the box to.