Dearly departed deliciousness: frozen Pepperidge Farm Boston Cream Pie

For the life of me, I can't find so much as a picture of these. I loved these frozen cakes so much that I asked for them to be my birthday cake on my ninth birthday. My mom would decorate them a bit with those tubes of decorator icing from the grocery store, top them with candles, and serve them just a bit frozen. The custard inside was just a bit icy.

Pepperidge Farm still makes frozen layer cakes, but according to their website, not of the Boston Cream variety. If someone has photos or memories of these cakes, do share!

Dearly departed: Snaks you can squeez

Please note that my headline is spelled correctly. Yes, it really was cheez product, and you could really squeez it from a squishy tube. And you thought Cheez Whiz was the beginning and end of pasteurized process cheese food product. Ohhhh, no. We had so many options for food-that-was-not-really-food in the 70s. Aren't you Millennials jealous, what with all your organic, all-natural, actual, real food?

This blasted onto my Facebook page randomly this week. I'd completely forgotten about it. Now I can't get the taste out of my head (kinda like Kraft Easy Cheese.) And I desperately want to squeez the cheez on some Chicken In a Biskit Crackers (also spelled wrong.)

My (almost) first cake: Stir'n Frost

In my evolution as a baker, sometime after saucer-sized, hockey puck-like Easy Bake Oven cakes came Betty Crocker Stir'n Frost Cakes. The cardboard-y pan, cake mix, and frosting all came in the box--you were even supposed to mix the cake batter in the pan (no need to dirty a bowl!) After the cake was done, you squeezed the frosting out of the foil packet. You didn't even need a knife to spread the sticky frosting--you just dragged the foil packet around the top of the cake.

Kid-sized, kit-ized, and sugar-ized. Anyone remember the other flavors? I remember only the chocolate.

And there's no truth to the rumor my hair looked exactly like that little girl's hair, or that I repeatedly combed it throughout the day so that it would flip back just like hers.

Tragically named and extremely discontinued: AYDS candy

My mom kept a box of these in the cupboard with the dishes…and the medicine. We weren’t supposed to eat them. They were For Adults.

So of course, we promptly ate them. They tasted kind of like fudge, but with that familiar, weird vitamin-y aftertaste. I figured they contained some type of amphetamine or something that swelled up in your stomach. Originally, AYDS apparently contained Benzocaine, a topical anesthetic, which aimed to dull your taste buds. Later, they (the AYDS, not your taste buds) hyped you up with phenylpropanolamine. Seriously. It was in the New York Times.

Check out the commercials for AYDS. AYDS are just little candies. They won't hurt you. Really!

Gee, I don’t know why they were taken off the market, what with the clever name, sweet, kid-enticing taste, and legalized speed...

Dearly departed deliciousness: Flicks candy

But wait, LBHG, you say. They still make Flicks, you say.

Alas, they make only a chocolate-flavored product in a tube that calls itself Flicks. But this product is not the Flicks of my childhood. Not the Flicks my grandma would buy me at Food Giant in West Seattle. Not the Flicks that slid out of their bright red tube directly into my mouth. Not the Girardelli Flicks made of real chocolate.

The original Flicks' wrapper is here at the geekily cool Candy Wrapper Museum.

Click if you must see the new Flicks. But I warned you.

Dearly departed and dehydrated: Mug-O-Lunch

Who knew you could have sooo much fun and tastiness in a mug?

Mug-O-Lunch tasted kind of like the Kraft Easy Mac and operated on the same principal: add boiling water to salty powder and macaroni that would never get fully tender, wait a few minutes, and your lunch is in the mug. Sounds kind of silly now that we live in the age of prepared food and instant everything, but this felt inventive and exciting at the time.

Here's a newspaper ad that promises three flavors: Macaroni and Cheese, Spaghetti, and Beef Noodle. I seem to remember a Chicken Noodle one available at some point as well.

My brother and I had to talk Mom into buying these; she would say they were too expensive and that she'd be happy to make us a sandwich. She was a stay-at-home mom, and she probably would have made us anything we wanted from scratch. But of course, we wanted the dehydrated salty crap in a mug.

Dearly departed deliciousness: Seven-Up bars

A candy bar that was actually seven candy bars in one is even better than a doll that's two dolls in one, or a mint that's two mints in one! Man, do I miss the Seven-Up candy bars.

Seven-Up bars had seven separate flavor sensations. According to Pearson's Candy Company, the flavors changed based on consumer taste. When it was discontinued in 1979, a Seven-Up bar had butterscotch caramel, cherry cream, fudge, orange jelly, nougat, coconut, and butter cream. You just couldn't find any candybar that compared to one of these--not even the Uno Bar, my other favorite.

Pearson's won't make this for us again, no matter how much we beg. They no longer have the proper equipment to do so, and they don't own the rights to the name. History and candy freaks should check out Pearson's website, which includes pictures of old Seven-Up wrappers.

And if you close your eyes, you can pretend the Sky Bar is a Seven-Up bar...okay, half a Seven-Up bar. But with different flavors. Sigh.

Not dear, but departed: Pepsi Light

I'm a hopeless Diet Coke addict, but remembering the taste of Pepsi Light makes me gag.

Remember how it had the lemony taste?  Who thought lemon was a good idea?

I believe this stuff was made with saccharin. I think Tab (yes, they still make Tab!) is the only soda I can think of that still uses saccharin, though now it seems to be a saccharin-aspartame blend.

Pepsi Light is available in a few other countries, but it no longer has the lemon or the saccharin and is basically Diet Pepsi with a different name.

Click below for an old Pepsi Light ad with Lauren Hutton, of all people. You'll remember the sky blue can.

Lauren Huton shills Pepsi Light

Badly named, mighty tasty, and gone

Considering these weren't clusters at all, I don't know why Nature Valley called them Granola Clusters.  They were marketed as "nature's answer to candy"--as though they had magically less sugar or were somehow healthier than candy. I doubt it. But granola anything was considered healthy in the 70s, no matter how much sugar or fat it had.

These were tubes that were filled with yumminess and rolled in something light and crunchy. Really delicious. Really discontinued.

This might be 1980s vintage, but close enough. Click below for a commercial.

Granola Clusters Commercial

Dearly departed deliciousness: Jell-o Spoon Candy

One of life’s great tragedies is that there are foods (and food-like products) that we dearly loved that we will never, ever eat again. I am mildly obsessed with these discontinued foods, especially ones from my childhood.


I offer one such example from the 70s: Jell-o’s Spoon Candy. Not merely pudding, this just-add-milk dessert had this amazing chocolate topping that was extremely firm, almost hardening to the consistency of truffle filling and probably made of the terrible hydrogenated oils that we aren’t supposed to eat any more. And as such, it’s probably impossible to recreate the exact taste at home.

Does anyone remember any other flavors? I remember only the vanilla with the chocolate topping.