Purchased at: Grocery Outlet (Lakewood)
Price: 33 cents for the bag
Marisa’s Take: I vividly remember my first time attending summer camp, experiencing a entire week away from the comforts of home. On the second night, the counselors summoned all of us to the fire pit for what I assumed would be an innocent campfire session with singing and stories about murdering children. Everyone was silent as the counselors decided our fate. We all gasped as they tore open the bags of smuggled, white puffy contraband and proclaimed, “We’re going to be playing a little game of Chubby Bunny.”
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, I’ll let Urban Dictionary do the honors:
“A game played by two or more players. One person at a time places a marshmallow in their mouths and then says “Chubby Bunny”. This is repeated, one marshmallow at a time, repeating “Chubby Bunny” each time. Players turn is over when they can no longer say “Chubby Bunny” or spit out the marshmallow.”
After witnessing your fellow campers furiously stuffing marshmallows into their mouths and subsequently retching them up seconds later, It’s no wonder that jumbo marshmallow stood out in my mind as a disgusting food. Interestingly enough, the very next year at another campfire session, a camper asked if we would be playing Chubby Bunny. The counselor nonchalantly mentioned, “Oh no, some girl choked and died so we won’t we doing that anymore.” As if I didn’t need any more things scarring me for life.
Fast forward and I have been reduced to eating only mini-marshmallows (both out of the bag and those little freeze-dried ones in cocoa packets). Thank goodness a new variety of jumbo marshmallow has come along to redeem all of marshmallow-kind for its past transgressions. Jet-Puffed Toasted Coconut Marshmallows combine the delicious nutty flavor of toasted coconut with the familiar white puffy treats. No longer used for just s’mores, the bag proclaims they’re “Great for Munchin’!” as well. As you can see from our photo, they’re also great for roasting with a blowtorch to truly create that crispy toasted coconut flavor.
Personally, I greatly prefer these to the regular variety – the toasted coconut is a nice tropical touch and also allows for unimaginably rich, fattening and ridiculous s’more varieties. One might use macadamia nut cookies instead of graham crackers with a toasted coconut marshmallow and a slab of chocolate for a Hawaiian S’more (patent pending). And since we picked up an entire bag of these for 33 cents, I’m happy to say that these marshmallows cured me up my childhood fears, and for a cheap price at that. You can’t say that about more therapists.
Ben’s Take: It’s 1986 and you’re a CIA operative operating as a component of a counter-terrorism program in a small tropical island nation. Your team has been living in a field camp for ten months. The locals have been supporting your efforts, and assume that you’re just another team of American field biologists researching the nighttime mating habits of Cynocephalus volan; a nocturnal flying lemur endogenous to the region your camp is stationed. The insurgents have been quiet, and the little intelligence you’ve been able to gather as of late has said that they were close to giving up the fight and moving out of the country.
Things are good, and the camp commander even ordered a few bars of chocolate, graham crackers and a couple bags of marshmallows to help everyone relax during the lull in activity. Nothing like a taste of homemade s’mores. Everyone is relaxing around the burn pit in the center of the camp, laughing, and having a great time roasting marshmallows and eating s’mores. It’s a great break from the tense reality of surveillance and information gathering.
As things start to get lively when one of the field operators pulls out an RPG-7 and sends a round right into a coconut tree’s coconut cluster. The RPG-shaped charge detonates against the coconuts sending a molten hot explosively formed rod of copper through the coconuts. As the smoke settles you notice that the toasted coconut fallout settled right on the tray of the marshmallows. Your conventional jet-puffed marshmallows have evolved into something far greater than they once were.
And that is the true* origins of the Kraft Jet-Puffed Coconut Marshmallow.
Toasted Coconut Marshmallows. For operators. By operators.
Now you’re probably wondering how these things taste and I’ll tell you. If you like marshmallows and sweetened coconut products separately, you need to try these. They are the best marshmallows I have ever eaten, and I haven’t even tried them as a s’more yet. Plain, microwaved, or blowtorched it doesn’t matter. They’re just fantastic.
I would like to warn you against following the packaging suggestion that they are a “great for munching” because it would be far too easy to plow through a bag of these without paying them any attention. At 1070 Calories and 12 tablespoons of sugar that’s not something Id recommend doing in a single sitting. Unless you want to try becoming insulin resistant. I’d also like to share that these were amazingly affordable at the South Tacoma location running a cool $0.33 a bag. This could be a terrible thing if you have a nasty habit of playing “Chubby Bunny” by yourself.
*A complete and utter fabrication.
