McDonald’s recently announced the return of their Holiday Pies and people are excited about what otherwise looks like a crime against dessert.
Look, desserts are one of the areas in which most everyone can agree fast food chains excel. Along with fries, milkshakes, soft serve and chewy cookies are among the best menu items that don’t require the caveat “for a fast food spot.” McDonald’s, specifically, has long been appreciated for its personal, single-serving baked apple pie that’s really more of a turnover but is nonetheless wonderful.
Lately, and by lately I mean over the past few decades, McDonald’s has experimented with other, sometimes seasonal, flavor pies — strawberry, pineapple, pumpkin and so on. This has culminated in the Holiday Pie, a horror show for the return of which people appear to be excited.
Here is a promotional photo of the pie.
Here is an IRL photo of the pie.
The Holiday Pie is made with a vaguely funfetti-flavored dough, that’s also vaguely sugar-cookie-with-rainbow-sprinkles-flavored, depending on who you ask. This is fine. Promising, even. The true crime is the filling. It’s just all vanilla custard. And not like, a reasonable, tasteful amount of vanilla custard. An overwhelming, oil-spill-disaster level of vanilla custard. It just oozes clumpy-looking vanilla custard.
Even if you like vanilla custard, this is too much vanilla custard. No one likes vanilla custard this much — it’s vanilla custard.
Yikes. Yeesh.
Still, a lot of people are excited about the return of the Holiday Pie, which will replace fall’s pumpkin pies and is sold for 89 cents. Maybe these HP fans know something we don’t know. Maybe they scoop out some of the custard. Maybe holiday pies actually taste good. After all, terrible looking things have been known to, on occasion, be delicious.
So far, Holiday Pies have only been spotted/advertised in Nebraska, New Orleans and Southern California, which also makes it impossible to draw any conclusions about who the target audience is for vanilla custard sprinkled with dough.
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I don’t know. Normally, I’d say you can’t go wrong with a fast food dessert. Oftentimes, they present an exciting opportunity to get outrageously indulgent because you’re at a fast food joint so health is already out of the window. But honestly, the level of vanilla custard in these photos goes far beyond indulgent and about 1,000 miles into suffocating.