Mexican Junk Food: ¡SPONCH!

¡SPONCH!’s package plainly states that it is “¡La galleta con mucho PONCH!” and you had better believe that is not an exaggeration. This unholy amalgamation of sweetness practically leaps out at you off the supermarket shelf, ¡SPONCH!ing you in the face and demanding you give them a try. Picture, if you will, four miniature Hostess Snowballs (marshmallow covered in coconut). Two are strawberry flavored, and two are plain flavored. Lay the whole thing on a butter cookie, and then, for good measure, squirt some strawberry jam in the center. Wow, even in just typing that, I realized I had described my dream cookie. However, there are some downsides.

One of the most surprising things that happens when you bust open a new box of ¡SPONCH! is you notice five individually wrapped packages. And each one of these packages contains SIX COOKIES. Now, six is a great number when you’re eating, say Oreos. Or the Thin Mints someone forced you to buy at the office. Six is not, however, a good number of ¡SPONCH! to eat in one sitting. Don’t get me wrong: I love marshmallow as much as the next guy, though not apparently as much as Mexicans. I swear, there are entire aisles in the markets here devoted to flavored marshmallows and marshmallow byproducts.

On your first ¡SPONCH!, you think to yourself, “The food scientists who created this are absolute geniuses.” On ¡SPONCH! number three, you’re thinking, “You know what? These could be a little bit less sweet.” ¡SPONCH! number five is hard to face, and by the time you’ve polished off your sixth, you never want to taste food in your mouth or feel it going down your throat ever again. So my first complaint is a good problem to have…there are simply too many ¡SPONCH!ies in a pack. A three-pack would be the right way to go on this.

Second, with all the jubilant, celebrating marshmallows dancing in their coconut crusts, little attention was given to the cookie’s core component. The cookie itself is rather flavorless, and somewhat frustratingly flaky. It doesn’t add a lot to the experience, other than providing a base for the party going on above it. This is also not a huge complaint, in the same way you don’t complain when the apartment full of hot sorority sisters who just moved in downstairs and spend all of their time giggling and having sexy drunken pillowfights, don’t know a lot about Keats. In fact, that’s what this cookie is. It is a sexy drunken pillowfight, where you accidentally get punched in the stomach at the end. ¡SPONCH!

Overall, ¡SPONCH! makes for a delicious, albeit overwhelming snack. The best news of all is in the fine print along the bottom of the package. It is here we learn a shocking fact. ¡SPONCH! is fortified with vitamins and minerals. This makes ¡SPONCH! my new favorite health food. Time for another package!

Photo: Flickr/mariahgem

Tagged as: mexican junk food

About the Author: Malcolm Bedell

My first memories of cooking start in Maine at six years old, when I wore a yellow rainslicker to avoid getting spattered by the bacon I was frying in a skillet. My interest in both Mexican cooking and recreating classic New England dishes from scratch developed while living in Mexico, on a steady diet of pork and habanero peppers. You can see more of my writing and photography online on Serious Eats, the Huffington Post, BlogHer, and Foodista, as well as in print for Downeast, Indulge, and Cigar Snob magazines.