Tonight, I drove the family through a strange place I hadn’t been in nearly a year: the Starbucks Drive-through.
In addition to some coffee (that ended up tasting pretty bad), I asked for four “brownie pops” to pass around to the kids. There weren’t any in the display case, so they gave me a box of four from the back, still sealed in its specialized plastic wrap. I don’t think they were supposed to do that. Anyway, I had more fun reading the label than eating the dessert. It’s hard not to be amazed at the flurry of no fewer than 66 ingredients, including:
titanium dioxide (to make the hard frosting whiter)
beet extract (to make the stripes of the crushed candy cane red)
vinegar (presumably to more strongly activate the baking powder)
citric acid (put in nearly everything nowadays)
carnauba wax (for waxing your snowboard?)
flour and cocoa (used for the actual “brownie” part)
It was actually pretty tasty!