Burger King Funnel Cake Sticks

September is barely half over and already I miss summertime fair season. The cotton candy. The fried Oreos. The bloomin' onions. The funnel cake.
Well, Burger King has something to ease funnel fans' pain. I speak of funnel cake sticks, pencil-thin rods of fried dough paired with the convenience of the drive-through.

The sticks are accompanied by a tiny tub of icing -- a curious choice, considering the best funnel cakes are simply dusted with sugar. Sure, there are chocolate eclair funnel cakes and the like, but the goo in those applications does less to dress up the cake than it does to mask the flavor of the batter. Burger King's icing works the same way. Its sucrose sweetness covers up the taste of the dough.

Not that you'll be able to keep much icing on the sticks. It's runnier than the New York Marathon and trickles down off the rods in a virtual torrent of down-the-drain sweetness. The path from the icing tub to your mouth will be a treacherous one, and I recommend putting down a tarp before eating the sticks so you're floor isn't covered in dribbles.

The King should have left out the icing, because the sticks are already sprinkled in powdered sugar. It's more granular than the stuff you get at the fair but is actually pretty good. Sadly there was a severe dearth of powdered sugar on my sticks, and I was forced to supplement it with some stopgap icing.

You're probably wondering why I've yet to address the funnel cake sticks themselves. The reason is simple: they're nothing special. Burger King should have funneled some more flavor into them, because they're dry and bland. They lack the simmering melt-in-your-mouth goodness of real fair funnel cake.

Alas, you'll have to look elsewhere to satisfy your need for a taste of summer fairs. Burger King funnel cake sticks only receive two sporks out of five.

Maybe you can run around in circles in the parking lot to simulate the tea cups at your local fair. It would be a more realistic experience than the King's take on funnel cake.