Pimp That Snack!
 There once was a time we were satisfied with the candy bars sold at corner stores and supermarkets. Those stunted sizes. Those puny, foil-wrapped portions. Pimp That Snack! changed that forever.
Now, we long for Cadbury's Eggs the size of coconuts, snowballs as big as football helmets, and Almond Joys that come in sizes L, XL, and cookie-sheet. Oh, joy!
Since launching his web-wide experiment in colossal pastry making, Pete—the Pimp Daddy behind Pimp That Snack!—has seen his page explode into a popular forum for wannabe chefs with visions of grandiose sugar-plums dancing in their heads. We wrote about the site just over a year ago. Now, we check in with the U.K.-based Pete about the state of affairs in the kitchen. He told us how a KitKat paved his way into free-form snack baking... Hey Pete, tell us what inspired you to start Pimp That Snack! In April last year, I bought a KitKat Chunky with Peanut Butter and I thought to myself, "I wonder how this would taste with regular peanut butter in it, instead." So I cracked it open and took out the peanut butter that was in it, and replaced it with my own. Then I put it all back together and tried it out, and it was great. During the process, I documented it step by step with photographs, and then posted it on a popular forum where it got a very good reaction. It was also featured in the b3ta.com newsletter that week, which got it a lot of attention. Then, another guy from the same forum suggested I start a web site doing the same kind of thing, which sounded like a good idea, so I did. You can see a copy of the original post I made here. Ha! We love it. It's so scientific and well-documented. Did you then find yourself searching around for another snack to pimp—or did the ideas come rushing at you? The guy that suggested I make the site submitted one himself, and also got a friend of his to do the same. I made another one and put that up to, and by the time the site had four or five it was starting to get several thousand hits a day. Wow. After that, people just started submitting them themselves and I didn't have to do too much more myself. I really wasn't expecting it. How much do you monitor the forum? Like, have you ever had to reject any pimps—or does that happen a lot? The snacks themselves don't get posted on the forum, people email them in to me as text with pictures attached. I have had to reject a few. Some have been so badly written, or the pictures have been so blurry that you can't make out what it is. But aside from that, as long as the effort has been made, it generally gets put up. Do you have a favorite? I like the bourbon biscuit. They're a big favorite in the U.K. and the recreation is extremely accurate. We love the giant Twix. We wish it were higher in the most popular listing! It's hard to beat that Creme Egg. The site has all this great interactivity, such as the popularity listings. Does it take up a lot of your time just running the backend? Back when it first started it almost took over my life. But these days it does run itself, with the exception of putting up some new pimps now and then. Tell us about the fund raising you're doing. Just after the site first started, a girl who was waiting for a double lung transplant emailed me asking if she could make a post on my forum about her awareness raising activities. I had a read into her background and got really taken in by her story. She has cystic fibrosis, which is a genetic condition that badly damages the lungs resulting in the need for transplant. By that point, she'd been on the waiting list for over a year. I decided to try and help her as much as I could, so we put up some banners to her campaign website, Live Live Then Give Life. Happily, she received her transplant just in time in January this year and is now living a nearly normal life, whereas before she was pretty much confined to a bed. There is a big shortage of organ donors in the U.K. so the fundraising is us trying to help raise some money for the campaign and help raise awareness. That's a wonderful use of the site's popularity. Well, what good is a popular web site if you can't do something productive with it? When you first started the site, it had a different name. Can you talk about what happened with that at all? The original name of the web site—"Pimp My Snack"—was suggested to me. And I didn't really think about it too much when I registered the name. I didn't anticipate more than 10 people would visit it. So its popularity was a surprise, no more so than the big threatening letter I received a couple of months after the site became popular. Apparently, I was purposefully infringing on an existing trademark. We remember how you had to write us and ask us to change the name. Whose trademark was feeling tramped upon? MTV and Viacom International, Inc. They had two trademarks, one for "Pimp My Ride" and one was for "Pimp My." So you went with "Pimp That Snack." We like that, too. It didn't really bother me. If the guy had suggested "giantsnacks.com," I'd probably have used that. It was just chance and a bit of bad luck. I don't think the name made the site popular. I should really give "the guy" his credit, as he did suggest putting the site up: His name is Steve Piers. He didn't put the site together or anything like that, but I can't deny he's the one who suggested I do it. What are some of your other favorite sites online? Ah, there are a few. The man behind Fat-Pie.com is a genius. I've never seen funnier Flash videos in my life. But another one I like is How It Should Have Ended. More Flash movies, showing how they think some popular movies should have ended, really funny stuff. We've been checking out your Website of the Week section, too. More great stuff there. My definition of week does stray a bit—it's more like whenever I remember to update it. Hey, it's your site! Hey, that's a good point. Thanks again, Pete. We're off to try our hand at a Mega Massive Mars. Life is good!
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