  Recently it has been found that a certain class of hybrid star equations of
state with a large latent heat (strong first order phase transition obtained by
a Maxwell construction) between stiff hadronic hadronic and stiff quark matter
phases allows for the appearance of a third family of compact stars (including
"twins") at high mass of $\sim 2 M_\odot$. We investigate how robust this
high-mass twin phenomenon is against a smoothing of the transition which would
occur, e.g., due to pasta structures in the mixed phase. To this end we propose
a simple construction of a pasta-like equation of state with a parameter that
quantifies the degree of smoothing of the transition and could eventually be
related to the surface tension of the pasta structures. It is interesting to
note that the range of energy densities for the transition as well as the
pressure at the onset of the transition of this class of hybrid star matter at
zero temperature corresponds well to values of the same quantities found in
finite temperature lattice QCD simulations for the 1 $\sigma$ region at the
pseudocritical temperature $T_c=154 \pm 9$ MeV. The pattern of the speed of
sound as a function of energy density is very different.
