My girls love the Archer Farms Monster Trail Mix. It’s everything you don’t want your trail mix to be – loaded with chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, M&Ms, and precious little of the healthy stuff that distracts your taste buds from the real reason you bought it in the first place – the junky part.
As we were browsing through Target, realizing we hadn’t come anywhere near spending the Way Over Our Budget sum of money we always spend when we go there, Jim spotted the Archer Farms Monster Pancake mix. Double the cost of what I usually spend on a box of pancake mix that will yield me easily four times the amount of pancakes, we had to have it. If nothing else, it was getting us to the point of overspending!
How could these pancakes be bad, right? Loaded with the trail mix components we love, they are filled with the chocolate and peanut butter chips, sprinkled liberally with nuts and raisins, and topped off with a handful of M&Ms, which turn the batter groovy tie dye colors as I mix in the milk, eggs, and oil.
They smell, well, blech. It sort of reminds me of fruit that is too ripe to eat. Sort of sickeningly sweet, but not in a luscious chocolate sort of way. I do what any decent mother would do – I make them anyway, because damn it, my kids are going to eat these pancakes that I just spent more money on than I would have a meal for 6 at IHOP.
By the time they are done, they are kind of chunky and bumpy looking, and still have the sweet smell. Eilis is the first of the guinea pigs children to try them. She takes one bite and declares “I’m not really liking these so much.” Without even trying them, Granuaile says they smell and she doesn’t like them either.
Into the garbage goes 18 pancakes, my breakfast plan for the morning, and the thought that you can put anything you want into a pancake and my kids will eat it.
Out of a possible 5 stars, we rate these pancakes ummm, well, can we get some stars back? We feel we’re owed them.