The Strawberry Pop-Tart blowtorch article by Dave Barry was originally published on June 27, 1993. His essay was inspired by an article from a New Philadelphia, Ohio newspaper, which discussed a similar experiment conducted in the investigation of a kitchen fire. (Further research on Google will reveal that Strawberry Pop-Tarts have been involved in numerous such incidents.) Dave contacted the investigator involved in the experiment, Don Dunfee, and learned that they had rigged a toaster to not pop up, and watched what happened to a strawberry Pop-Tart placed within. After about 5 minutes, 55 seconds, it emitted flames up to three feet high. Mr. Barry, being the whimsical and motivated chap that he is, decided to replicate the experiment himself, and reported nearly identical results. The full text of his (quite amusing) 1993 article is available at http://www.jpmahoney.com/Public/poptart.txt
The next year, Patrick R. Michaud, a professor at Texas A&M at Corpus Christi, repeated the experiment himself, and this time created a web page of the results. His page, a WWW classic, while no longer available at the original http://www.sci.tamucc.edu/~pmichaud/toast/, can be found at http://gearbox.maem.umr.edu/personal/cottrell/poptarts/poptarts.htm, complete with GIF images and minimal HTML formatting. This page very quickly became quite popular, and was one of the first web pages I visited when I was first learning how to use the World Wide Web in 1994. Patrick Michaud's website also holds a page describing his earlier experiment Fun with Grapes - A Case Study, which discusses what happens when you put a bisected grape in a microwave oven.