America Eats the Birthday Cake Empanada, Then Files Reports

The empanada arrived on Thursday. By Thursday afternoon, America had opinions, and by Thursday evening, America had a support group. The narrator has eaten four. The narrator is fine. The narrator is writing this from a bathroom stall at a regional airport and wishes you to know that the narrator is, in the specific, fine.

Taco Bell and Milk Bar, the New York bakery that made the milk bar cookie famous, reunited on October 15 to release the Milk Bar Birthday Cake Empanada: a fried pastry shell filled with birthday-cake-flavored cream, dusted in sprinkles, sold for a limited time, while supplies last, which is the phrase the fast-food industry uses when it knows.

1. The Pastry. The empanada is golden, hot, and shaped exactly like a lie. It looks like a burrito’s respectable cousin. It weighs about as much as a tennis ball and tastes, in the first three seconds, like a birthday party. The narrator’s first three seconds were beautiful. The narrator’s next three hours were a journey.

2. The Witnesses. “I got eleven,” said Kaylee Torres, 19, outside a Taco Bell in Tucson, wearing a shirt that said “EMPA NADA.” “Eleven. I ate six in the parking lot and gave five to my friends and my friends are my enemies now. We don’t talk. We can’t. The parking lot is a crime scene and we’re all suspects.”

Mayor Dale Hutchins of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, a town of 9,000, issued a statement about the empanada that the town council later asked him to remove from the town website. The statement called the pastry “a triumph” and “a personal enemy.” The narrator stands by both readings.

A middle schooler in Columbus, who asked to be identified only as “the survivor,” told the narrator: “We did a challenge. Twelve of us. One empanada each. By second period, the bus driver pulled over. It wasn’t even a decision. He just pulled over, like a captain.”

3. The Science. Dr. Priya Raman, a gastroenterologist, agreed to speak on the record and then, on the record, asked the narrator to stop taking notes. “It is cake,” she said. “Fried. In a shell. On an empty stomach. At 2 p.m. What did you think was going to happen?” The narrator thought about it at length and concluded that the doctor is right, and that America knew it too, and that America ate eleven anyway.

4. The Aftermath. The empanada is, by every objective measure, delicious, and the narrator wants that on the record between the reports. The shell shatters. The filling is sweet and warm. The sprinkles are doing their job. It is a birthday party in your hand, and a birthday party, as has been well-documented, is a thing that ends.

The narrator’s fourth empanada was at 4:40 p.m., in the airport, before a 6:15 flight. The narrator made the flight. The narrator made it in the specific, and the gate agent made eye contact with the narrator in a way that said she knew, and the narrator said nothing, because the narrator is a professional, and because the narrator had eaten eleven.

The empanada is available while supplies last. The narrator advises buying one. The narrator advises, with the full weight of this newspaper behind him, buying one.

The narrator is buying two.