Peeps! (PS)

It is the time of year in which the Lord’s death and resurrection are celebrated in the holiday of Easter. This is an excellent point in the year for candy sales, and really big rabbit costumes. Really though, does anyone else find the idea of a rabbit going around and hiding multi-colored eggs slightly creepy? Anyway, if you are not familiar with the sweet marshmallow delights called Peeps I do not think you can really be considered American. Sorry, that is just the way it is in my mind. Once, again I ran across a story on Yahoo, and this time it was over how people are using peeps in interesting ways from recipes to dioramas. I found this to perk my interest because I have always enjoyed peeps, perhaps to an unhealthy extent.

Apparently, one of those uses includes the Washington Post’s peep contest. From what I could pick up this is the fourth time they have done this competition, and there were some pretty interesting entries which can be viewed in the photo gallery. The big winner for this year was a piece entitled “EEP” which was a model of the house and balloon invention from the movie UP. Overall, I think the contest was a pretty interesting idea though the reason behind it eludes me, but obviously people really got into it since there were one thousand one hundred entries. Personally, I would be too tempted to eat the peeps before I could do anything artistic with them.

The edibility of peeps was another subject I read about in the article. There are a lot of different recipes listed on the peeps official site. These recipes include the peeps in a decorative type fashion on cakes, cookies, cupcakes, and even lollipops. An interesting thing I learned from the official website was that there are peeps for Halloween, Christmas, and Valentines as well as Easter. Also, there are flavored peeps including chocolate mousse and strawberry crème. By the way, I have to say I really liked the snow globe cupcake idea from the recipe archive, and was pretty entertained by the sight.

One thing the article on Yahoo mentioned was the shelf life of peeps being pretty much forever. I have to say that I cannot consider this to be a good thing. Though, I also have to say the source cited as a link in the phrase “scientific fact” in their article is a little “weird.” In fact, the link leads to a piece on Weird Science, which, according to the author, is what science professors do for fun. I did not find the article to be to supportive of the claim, but then again I did not read the last few paragraphs because of lack of interest.

As a final note, I would just like to say that the only way to truly enjoy eating peeps is fresh out of the box. For a reason unknown to me some people like to wait to let the peeps harden and then eat them. I feel this is just not right. Why would anyone want to stick a hard marshmallow in their mouth? I do not understand it at all.