Easy Bake Kids' Dessert Kits: Cotton Candy Parfaits

When Dave and I hit the food section of job lot stores, it's always going to be a unique experience. But there's a huge difference in what we look for when we go. Usually, while Dave is inspecting some kind of dubious canned meat and prowling for oddly shaped pastas, I'm busy looking for some kind of strange confection or decent quality chocolate that I haven't tasted before. But on one of our latest outings, we were both struck by the same thing: a box of Easy Bake Cotton Candy parfaits. At $1.50 per box, we decided to try it out.

Preperation for these is as easy as making instant pudding, because that's essentially what they are: Two packets of colored cotton candy flavored pudding (in attractive pastel pink and it's-a-boy blue), and a packet of those hard marshmallows you get in hot cocoa or a box of Lucky Charms cereal. After mixing up the pudding according to the package directions, I spooned it into the plastic cups that were included in the box. After filling each cup halfway, it was time for the marshmallows to go in.

The package said to divide them evenly between the four cups. Now, partly because I'm a loser and partly because I had nothing better to do at the time, I decided to count up the hard, dehydrated bricks to see how many were in the packet. The total was 220.5, making that about 55 marshmallows per cup. After adding the marshmallows as the middle layer, I topped the desserts off with the remaining pudding and chucked them in the fridge to set.

Acouple of hours later, Mom, Dave, and I enjoyed them for dessert. Overall, they weren't bad. Artificial cotton candy flavor is very much like a burnt sugar taste, and these were no exception. It's nowhere near as delicious as pulling apart fresh cotton candy at a county fair or something, but these little treats were certainly passable. After sitting in the fridge, the marshmallows had begun to soften and start to melt between the wet layers of pudding, so those were kind of nasty. However, the package says to eat the pudding within three hours, and with good reason: the fourth parfait got to sit in the fridge overnight, and when I looked at it the next morning, the marshmallow center had melted into a very odd layer of pale white slime. Yuck.


The best place to look for these dessert kits are in job lot stores, I guess. They're made by Jel-Sert, the same company that makes Royal Gelatine, Royal Pudding, and My-T-Fine Pudding and Pie Fillings. A check at their website doesn't even mention Easy Bake Kid's Dessert Kits, so I think it's safe to say they're no longer in production.

Link:

Jel-Sert Website
.