Hostess Ninja Turtles Pies
A Hostess pie with a bright green glaze and vanilla pudding inside, "Filled with Vanilla Puddin' Power," one turtle per wrapper. They were on shelves for 1991 only, and a whole generation has been trying to describe the taste of that green icing ever since.
Hostess had sold pudding pies before, a chocolate and a vanilla version introduced in 1986 alongside the standard fruit pies and dropped again within about a year. In 1991, with the Turtles at their peak and the second movie in theaters, the vanilla pie came back with a green glaze in place of the chocolate coating, packaged as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pies, "Filled with Vanilla Puddin' Power."
The wrappers featured the turtles, one per wrapper or the whole team together, and inside some was a sticker and in others a trading card promoting the 1991 sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Wrappers carried "pudding points" that could be mailed in for merchandise: T-shirts, decoder cards with Morse-code messages, battle-signal clickers and a turtle-shell belt buckle. The pies were a limited release, made for that one year, and Hostess has never brought them back, or the pudding pies either.
What survives is the memory of the color, a glaze somewhere between lime and slime, and of a vanilla pudding filling nobody has been able to reproduce, which is why recipe sites and fan pages keep trying.
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