The Worst Hostess Snack Is Best Left On Store Shelves

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As its namesake acknowledges, nothing goes with a cuppa joe like coffee cake. But, if you want a taste of the real deal, we recommend flexing a little home-baking flair with these cinnamon flop cake and homemade coffee cake recipes. Foodies won't find the flavor they crave tucked inside Hostess' plastic wrappers. In Tasting Table's ranking of 14 Hostess snacks and treats, the brand's Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cakes landed in last place.

Hostess' Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cakes deliver in the convenience and price departments. At a Target in Chicago, an eight-count box of individually-wrapped snack cakes runs for just $3.79. They are even sold at some Dollar Tree locations. This, however, is where our praise ends. The product doesn't deliver on texture or taste. As we mentioned in our taste-test, "[I]t tastes like biting into a cake that just hasn't finished cooking. The top, according to the package, should have a streusel texture that looks a little crumbly. Ours, however, was relatively flat and very moist, creating that overly mushy feel."

Admittedly, to expect a plush, bakery-worthy texture from a plastic-wrapped cake would largely be an automatic setup for failure. Still, less excusable is the fact that Hostess' cinnamon coffee cakes taste more like straight-up sugar than like any advertised baking spice. What arrived on the palate (per our review) was a "very sugary bite with some cinnamon, but not nearly enough to satiate our hopes for that warm spice."

This seems to be a common criticism of the product. One Amazon product review mentioned a "sticky, bitter, artificial flavor." Another reviewer felt the cakes "barely [had] any cinnamon streusel. [...] They are not making these like they used to." A different person asserted, "All I could taste was the sugar." The official Hostess website suggests dunking the product in coffee before eating it. Indeed, giving these somehow simultaneously too-dry, weirdly-underdone, hyper-sweet cakes a java soak might be the most efficient way to get 'em to go down yer gullet easily. In fact, even customer reviews on the Hostess company site rank them at a meager 3.6 stars out of 5. As one unhappy customer complained, "Two bites and you know you have wasted your money. They taste like the plastic they are packaged in with not enough cinnamon."

One Reddit thread speculates that Hostess' products as a whole have taken on a different taste since the company's 2012 bankruptcy and subsequent acquisition by entrepreneur C. Dean Metropoulos under new management. Either way, by our count, Hostess' Cinnamon Streusel Coffee Cakes are on-par with Little Debbie's Christmas Cherry Cordials, which we also advise skipping. Stick to Hostess' Lemon Baby Bundt Cakes — the snacks which topped our ranking of the brands oeuvre.