Welcome to day 23 of Tag Sale Tastes’ Pumpkinpalooza!

Today I tried Hostess Limited Edition Pumpkin Spice Twinkies, described as “golden sponge cake with pumpkin spice creamy filling.”

I was really torn about whether to buy these.  The picture on the box did not look appealing — kind of like a post-apocalyptic corn dog.

The ingredient list did little to persuade me to buy these:

Vegetarians, and probably non-vegetarians, will be disappointed, maybe even shocked to see “beef tallow” and “hydrogenated beef tallow” among the ingredients.  According to my research, beef tallow is primarily used in producing soap and animal feed.  What is it doing in Twinkies?

Each box contains 10 individually-wrapped Twinkies:

Here’s a Pumpkin Spice Twinkie:

A look at the filling:

Between the beef tallow and the flesh-colored filling, I was not looking forward to biting into the Twinkie.  And my instincts were right.  These were downright nasty — a word uniformly used by my other tasters (including my friend Joe, who accidentally sampled the Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Flavored Dog Treats and, I think, found them preferable to the Twinkies).  The sponge cake part was fine, but the unpleasant artificial flavors in the filling came through loud and strong.  Shaking my head.

Rating:  1 pumpkin (out of 5)