We Tried The New Limited Edition Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts. They're Great For Gingerbread House Construction.

Does winning $15,000 for eating Pop-Tarts sound too good to be true? Well, it is. On the other hand, using the new limited edition Frosted Gingerbread flavored decorative Pop-Tarts to construct a gingerbread house could win you that $15K prize if you win the Pop-Tarts Drury Lane Contest, which runs until December 16, 2022. You can read all the rules and get some insight into what makes for a winning level of Pop-Tarts gingerbread house at the official contest page. But our job here isn't to spend all day talking gingerbread house construction. We would rather be tucking into the Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts themselves.

To do that, first, we popped a couple of these seasonal pastries in the toaster and tried them hot and fresh. Then we tried them at room temperature and even tested a chilled one. We read up on the ingredients and compared them to many other popular variations of Pop-Tarts as well. We'll share it all in detail and tell you whether or not this gingerbread house-building material is also worth eating on its own.

Of the principal seven ingredients found in these new Pop-Tarts, nearly half a dozen of them are sweeteners. Let that sink in for a moment. Five out of seven of the primary ingredients here are different types of sweetening agents. Those seven ingredients are enriched flour, sugar, corn syrup, soybean and palm oil (which are treated as one ingredient), high fructose corn syrup, dextrose (that's essentially just more sugar), and molasses. So there's little wonder that these Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts are nothing less than sugar bombs. Nor is there much wonder why the actual spice and ginger flavor is pretty mild.

In the "contains 2% or less of" ingredients we find: modified corn starch, salt, leavening, cinnamon, wheat starch, ginger, sodium stearoyl lactylate, gelatin, color added, DATEM, soy lecithin, natural and artificial flavor, xantham gum, red 40, blue 1, and yellow 5. 

For those of you keeping score at home, that means cinnamon — which you would expect to be a central flavor element — is only the 11th ingredient. Meanwhile, the seemingly namesake ginger is 13th in line. These things are made of sugar and additional sugary ingredients cobbled together with some wheat products, corn products, and some artificial ingredients added to the mix. The holiday spices appear to be an afterthought.

We paid $3.99 for a box of Kellogg's new Limited Edition Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts at a local Target. They're also for sale for $4.68 at Walmart for a box of 16 Pop-Tarts. That's a marginally better price than we paid for our 12 Pop-Tart box. While some shady-looking sellers on Amazon are selling the 16-count Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts for just under 20 bucks, we think that you shouldn't spend that much for these or any toaster treat.

We're going with a $3.99 12-pack of Pop-Tarts as the standard, as it's the price we saw most often. That makes it about 33 cents per Pop-Tart, which means these things are affordable enough to use a few for gingerbread house construction, even though you know it means they may never be eaten. You don't actually eat your gingerbread house at the end of the season, right? Maybe a piece of candy here or there, but how many of you eat the walls? 

Of course, if that gingerbread house nets you $15,000 when you post pictures of it to Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag #GingerbreadPopTartEntry, it will have been money and time well spent. As for the time someone spent making a Zillow listing for a Pop-Tarts Gingerbread Lodge, that's still good, clean fun.

So we know that the official Kellogg's™ Pop-Tarts™ Drury Lane Contest closes to entries on December 16, 2022, at 11:59 p.m. eastern time. And we know these Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts are officially a limited edition item. But we don't know when their production and distribution will officially halt, as Kellogg's has not made that information clear. There are plenty in stock in stores right now based on our quick check, so if you don't want to miss frosted Pop-Tarts emblazoned with winter season imagery, you'd probably better stock up now.

And don't worry if you buy a few boxes but find you're eating these sweet and moderately gingery Pop-Tarts slowly, they'll be good for a good long while. The printed expiration date on the box we secured in mid-November of 2022 was until late July of 2023, meaning a safe shelf life of well over eight months. This is good because these are best eaten as a treat now and then, not consumed as a daily breakfast staple.

Those of you keeping close track of the Pop-Tarts world will have already noted that this season's Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts isn't Kellogg's first foray into gingerbread toaster treats. The company released a somewhat comparable Pop-Tart in 2015 that was also gingerbread-flavored and also had seasonal images printed on them. The major difference? The frosting was missing from the previous version (via Junk Banter). For our money, we think adding the frosting was gilding the lily, but you can make your own call there.

If you want to compare these Pop-Tarts to others you already know, start with the classic Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts. If you love those, you will probably enjoy the seasonal gingerbread variety. Despite that similarity of flavor, we want to make it clear that the Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts are much sweeter. They're so sweet that these pastries are comparable in sheer sugariness to the Frosted S'Mores Pop-Tarts, minus the chocolate.

Well, friends, it's time to reveal the nitty-gritty details of these seasonal Pop-Tarts. In good news, these are not that high in calories, at least not as high as you may expect. A single serving of two Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts will net you 370 calories, making just 185 calories for a single Pop-Tart. 

The bad news is, well, everything else. A pair of Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts contains 12 grams of fat, which is 12% of your daily total according to the label. That's not terrible, sure, but neither is it ideal. That serving also contains 3 grams of saturated fat, which is 15% of your recommended daily total. The serving's 410 milligrams of sodium constitute 18% of your daily recommended allotment, while the 69 grams of carbs are 25% of that. Against all that, the 4 grams of protein per serving are unimpressive.

The big problem? Sugar. One serving has 32 grams of added sugars which account for 64% of the total daily value for a classic 2,000-calorie diet. But that's only part of the story. Per the Harvard School of Public Health, it's more like 88% of the ideal daily total for an adult man and a whopping 133% for a woman. The school maintains that men should consume a maximum of 36 grams of sugar daily, with 24 grams per day for a woman.

We just didn't enjoy these new Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts. They are simply too sweet, and the ginger was just too mild, especially given how much we looked forward to the holiday flavor. When heated up in the toaster, that sweetness was even more concentrated as the gooey filling oozed out in all its sugary intensity. 

At room temperature (which we deemed "college style"), these Pop-Tarts were better. When served chilled (we put them in the fridge, though some people may prefer to freeze their Pop-Tarts) they were more enjoyable still, as that sweetness was much more muted. If you love sweet stuff, you may well love these Pop-Tarts. 

To the treat's credit, we do love the way the pastries look. The decorations on the Frosted Gingerbread Pop-Tarts are charming and will help you make a great-looking gingerbread house, especially the mailbox and the chimney designs. Hopefully, you get those particular designs in your box. As for whether or not you enter the contest and share a snap of your Pop-Tarts gingerbread house online, that's your call. We'll be content just to admire our gingerbread house in our kitchen.