Welcome to day 9 of Tag Sale Tastes’ Pumpkinpalooza 2020!
Today I conquered my fears and tried Hostess Iced Pumpkin CupCakes:
The pumpkin advises that these “iced pumpkin cakes with creamy filling” are a limited edition:
The only pumpkin spice-y ingredient that I could see was pumpkin puree, buried among a whole slew of hard to pronounce ingredients:
Like the Hostess Pumpkin Spice Twinkies that I sampled in 2015, these also contain tallow, which didn’t belong in the twinkles and doesn’t belong in these cupcakes.
They come individually wrapped, which helps prevent cross-contamination in a lunchbox: 
And here’s the cute little cupcake. Don’t you love the orange squiggle?
Taking a peek inside, they do indeed have a creamy filling as advertised:
These are a hard pass. Oh my, they were nasty. The pumpkin cake has an overwhelming and entirely unpleasant artificial spice taste. The cream filling wasn’t bad, but you have to tunnel through that awful cake to get to it. I’m sorry, but how can you screw up a cupcake so badly? Tsk tsk Hostess — that’s two pumpkin strikes against you.
Rating: 1 pumpkin (out of 5)
Ready for the big reveal? Here they are:
I’ll admit — I was looking forward to these. I’ll also admit that I was sorely disappointed. For all the coloring ingredients, I expected them to at least be orange. I needed them to be orange. But they were beige, which is not pumpkin-y at all. I could get past the color if they tasted good, but sadly, they did not. They did not taste like pumpkin pie at all. They tasted more like marshmallows that I bought for a Boy Scout campout and didn’t use and found in the trunk of my car months later. Kinda piney, kinda soapy. They also leave an unpleasant aftertaste. I don’t know about the other flavors they make, but these Smashmallows are now Trashmallows.