Wow, how interesting, I never knew they were a rarity. I live in california, and used to see them all the time. everywhere they sell hostess you’d see chocodiels with big bright orange sticker that said 39 cents on it. I guess now I know why they were always on sale, and why they sometimes seemed a little stale.

Oh and those hostess thrift shops rock!. I remember bakc when I was a kid it was the only place I could find the teenage mutant ninja turtle hostess vinallia filled fruit pie thingy.

mmm thsoe were good, anyone else’s vanilla filled pie thingies just cannot compare!

Chestnuts roasted by Chris @ 01/09/2004 8:11 PM

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Years ago I put out a contest to my friends to find me the rare choco-diles. To my shock and pleasure they searched all of Dale City and Woodbridge,VA and brought me around 10 boxes. The funny part was that a co-worker would walk past the kitchen and grab a "dile" on his way to the back. On his way back to the front he would grab another"dile". He killed off a whole box in 1 day. We feasted on my loot but he set the record.

Chestnuts roasted by silverdragon @ 01/09/2004 8:27 PM

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Expiration dates are a Guideline: The ‘Diles wont instantly mold and become green On that date, thats just the date that they should no longer be sold after. A Week is fine, Even Two weeks after the expiration date is ok. When they do in-fact START to smell/taste/feel strange is when they are Truely Dead to the World.

Chestnuts roasted by Stego S. Aurus @ 01/09/2004 9:15 PM

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Few things Matt. First, damn you for making me hungry and having no way of procuring snack cakes. Second, what the hell happened to Lando?!? Too much Colt 45? And third, give your expired Chocodiles to stoners. Speaking as one, I know that I’d eat those without hesistation. Stoners don’t really care, hell, I seriously contemplated eating a mini fruitcake I found under the desk one night. I didn’t, but I thought about it for way longer than I should have.

Chestnuts roasted by Black Zarak @ 01/09/2004 10:33 PM

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There used to be a Hostess Bakery Thrift store by the Freehold Raceway Mall many many years ago. It was a paradise filled with cheap eats. A very filty paradise.

Me and my brother would go there, stock up on cupcakes, hide them in our jackets and go to the (very sleazy) $2 theater and avoid the rest of the extremely sleazy stripmall.

Sadly, the Hostess stores stands empty today, and the $2 is not a Work Out World. Sad times indeed.

Chestnuts roasted by Bento Bunny @ 01/09/2004 11:03 PM

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Damn, I envy you people. Not only had I never heard of Choco-Diles until I started reading X-Entertainment, but I never heard of Hostess/Wonder Bread having a store of their own until I read this article! I’ve never seen the things at all in southern New Jersey.

Sigh. As interesting as Matt’s article is (and it’s one of your best – the things you go through for journalism!), I think I’ll stick to Swiss Rolls if I want chocolate-covered cake. I lack the ambition and desperation needed to call California for dessert. : 0 )

Chestnuts roasted by starwenn @ 01/09/2004 11:21 PM

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matt, i think the answer here is obvious. stick them expired bastards in a cool, dry place for about five years, and then write an article about eating five-year old snack cakes. simple innit?

btw, i’ve read the nads hair removal article, so don’t tell me you haven’t had worse.

Chestnuts roasted by n0thingleft @ 01/09/2004 11:59 PM

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the only thing i remember about those Hostess cakes what the little cartoons on the back of the 80′s comic books. Whichever marvel hero happened to be featured would be dumbfounded on how to defeat the nondescript villian of the moment. Eventually the hero would distract the villian with creamy hostess goodness while sneaking up capture him. And the villian was always happy to be carted off to jail as long as he had a fruit pie/twinkie/cupcake in his maw.

Chestnuts roasted by medevac @ 01/10/2004 1:41 AM

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Too weird-I live in Northern California and I’ve never seen chocodiles anywhere. Oh well, I’ll stick with my lemon fruit pies…

Chestnuts roasted by salaciouscrum @ 01/10/2004 2:03 AM

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Yum! to anyone who wants a choco-dile so bad, why dont you just dip a twinkie in chocolate?

matt: did you have to actually ask for the poster? i would be heaps embarrased >_<

Chestnuts roasted by Rachel Cakes @ 01/10/2004 4:03 AM

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Anyone who watches teenage dramas on television these days has a pretty good idea of what it’s like living in O.C. (sadly, the television show has corrupted the semantics of the Southern California, and now most people know it as the O.C.). Anyway, if you’re familiar with the show, you should have no problem believing me when I say that girls in bikinis would bring me Choco-diles every day after school. And if for some reason they forgot (y’know, shopping at the mall or something), it was never more than 5 minute ride on my Beach-cruiser to the nearest Choco-dile. I, along with many of the other posters from California fall into the group of people whose first thought was "Choco-diles are rare?"

No need to cut and paste it all, but if you go back to the article, center that picture of the wall of bread on your screen, and read the surrounding paragraphs, you can die a happy man (or woman). I will now create a new word for Matt that combines ingenious and brilliant… and that word shall be: Inbrillious.

Aaron, I live in Japan now, and just about the closest thing I can get to "authentic" mexican food is Taco-Flavored Doritos. God Damn I miss real mexican food. That shit’s inbrillious.

Chestnuts roasted by Chopstick Sensei @ 01/10/2004 8:28 AM

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Duuuuuude you so should just eat em…don’t fear the reaper…dude.

Chestnuts roasted by The Dude...the REAL one..that Matt dislikes. @ 01/10/2004 11:13 AM

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Heiiiiiidi-Ho! Been there, done that, (decades ago, I ate a choco-dile; N.B. singular), bought the Tee-Shirt. [sorry, calm down, only kidding about the Tee-shirt]. There is no way you can do the "dirty pool" trick with a choco-dile- If memory serves, the ‘CD’ disintegrates at ambient humidity, let alone submerged like a…… so the best you’ll do is make the whole pool .000001% darker……. "Chauncey" is also the name of the frog villian from the old Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse cartoons and I always wondered if the ‘croc’ was ripping CC&MM off……..Anyhooo, it does my heart good to see the ‘pre’-, ‘real’-, and ‘late arrival’- Baby-Boomers (plus a 67 year old! god bless he took the time to learn the computer) come out of the old-growth woodwork to comment on choco-diles and join the genX and Y’rs on this absurdly addicting site that I stumbled upon while ‘surfing’. I guess I’m not alone. What a unifying forum when you think about it! But it does "gall my stones" to read a GenX’er "reminicing" about the 80′s for God’s sake, the 80′s were just a BLINK ago! They’re almost NOW! No? omigod in the 80′s I could reminice (too lazy now to look for the dictionary) about the 60′s..sheesh. Now that I think of it, you kids born in the 80′s are actually old enough to drive cars and go to college! Holey moley! Why, back in my day….. —-To set the record straight (in my mind), the term "East Coast" normally refers to "New Jersey" (most densely populated State etc, etc.) or at least the Middle Atlantic States (Sorry Maine and Florida), and probably one of my first realizations that "Madison Ave" had too much of a "hand" in matters that affect my life was when I noticed the ‘flip-flopping’ of the name Ding Dongs, and King Dons (I thought I was getting a new product, so I tried it… to my disappointment–exactly the same product. Sort of like Dr. Pepper in the North and Mr. Pibb in the South). Also, did anyone else ever notice that most of those "thrift shops" uncannily resemble airplane hangars from the outside? And were always perched high on precarious hills? For those of you who have never seen/eaten a choco-dile and think you want to, don’t get your hopes up. The chocolate covering is not like that of a Ring-Ding or a Yodel, it’s more like a waxy mousse (or maybe the one I ate years ago was expired [or already ‘folded, spindled, or mutilated’ (punchcard reference) also). As for the person manning the ‘airplane hangar’ in Woodbridge, that person’s accent is genuinely representative of those who grew up in some parts of New Jersey or New York (in NJ that accent was strictly limited to the Jersey City/Union City area near the coastline of the Hudson River and Brooklyn/Queens near the East River) in the 50′s/60′s and alas, that unique dialect is dying out. However, my neighbor from the area still seriously refers to the porcelain convenience as a ‘terlet’(first time I heard him I thought he was kidding). To GenZ’rs that dialect will be as obsolete as Latin or Esperanto, so enjoy now and revel in the glory that is the present. (Heckle & Jeckle reference:’squoit of earl’). My experience makes me believe that for better or worse, most people (including myself) from NJ talk like the famous former Professional Basketball player and NJ State Senator (this includes the ‘deadpan’), even though I believe he is from Boston, go figure. Serious question: Does Matt himself write all these comments, a la the rumor about a famous Girly Mag’s forum? Well as usual, I have squandered a good portion of my day on this insidious, mind-controlling, interactive television set, and I still have stories to tell about Drakes Fruit cakes and their products and commercials, and what life was like with ‘tube’ TV’s with ‘rabbit ears’ and without remote controls, cars with carburettors and non-maintenance-free car batteries, but I have miles to go before I sleep, and some of my synapses are firing well-enough to tell me it’s time to quit, so I hope you have as much fun reading this as I had writing it, thanks for the opportumity–OUT!

Chestnuts roasted by ibinsomniac @ 01/10/2004 12:12 PM

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