Whether it’s ice cream, cappuccinos, pancakes, or Grandpa’s old 1972 Buick, everything’s better when you cover it in chocolate.
Heck, I was even gonna give you my complete, 5000+ item list of things that taste better when slathered in creamy cocoa, but I couldn’t read it because I covered the list in chocolate. Totally worth it, though: this list tastes delicious.
Rice Krispies Treats are no exception to the rule. Kellogg’s “new” Cocoa Krispies Treats—which have probably been released before—come in original and “with Milk Chocolate M&M’s Minis” varieties. Since that’s like IHOP selling Plain Waffles and Belgian Waffles with Maple Syrup for the same price, I predict that boxes of normal Cocoa Krispies Treats will slowly gather dust on grocery shelves until the zombie apocalypse, at which point they’ll be used and traded as valuable currency.
But I’m not here to talk about disappointing, underachieving, and plain Cocoa Krispies Treats. Today is all about his Harvard-bound, candy morsel-stuffed older brother.
These puppies are small (Cheerio for scale). Each one is hardly larger than a handful of Britney Spears HitClips, which makes it impossible to enjoy a Cocoa Krispies Treat for long. Each lasts 2-3 bites at most, which is appropriate, since 2-3 bytes is about the size of the grainy audio file on a Britney Spears HitClip.
Okay, I promise not to make another HitClips reference until the year 2999.
On first bite, the chocolate notes are surprisingly complex. Each faintly chewy, mostly crackly Cocoa Krispie tastes like it has a wisp of aerated cocoa essence floating around inside its thin rice shell. As I chew through this barrier, the gaseous “choco-air” hisses out in a split second of bittersweet delight. If you see those last sentences reappear in a dystopian cereal sci-fi novel later, remember where you read them first.
But this moment of pressurized chocolate fun doesn’t last, as it leaves behind a husk of chewy, bland rice coated in overly sweet, processed marshmallow. Something about granulated, sugary marshmallow doesn’t mix well with plain ol’ cocoa powder, and it made about 33% (which is equivalent to one bite) of my Cocoa Krispies Treat experience unpleasant.
Thankfully, the M&M’s Minis were there to salvage the other 67%. Marshmallows need creamy milk chocolate to thrive (hence why no one, not even hipsters, make s’mores with 99% pure cacao dark chocolate), and the periodic pops of candied M&M’s chocolate provide that milkiness, as well as a crispy-to-crunchy textural contrast.
That means that your experience with these M&M’s Cocoa Krispies Treats will hinge entirely on a luck of the draw. See, I opened several Treats, and each featured a different frequency and distribution of M&M’s Minis. Some had even coverage, featuring all six colors of M&M’s “ROY G. BB” candy rainbow. These bars provided a balanced, pleasant snack for the 4.5 seconds I spent eating them. Meanwhile, other bars had weirdly clustered colonies of just green M&M’s on one corner, while a largely bland and dry cocoa desert blanketed the rest of the Treat.
So if you’re feeling lucky, but not lucky enough to watch Dirty Harry or put money on a real roulette wheel, feel free to put it all on brown and spin through a box of M&M’s Cocoa Krispies Treats instead.
The rest of us are probably better off waiting 2-3 months for Count Chocula Treats to return. Those bad boys are bigger, fudgier, creamier, filled with chocolate chips, and they have a gosh darn cartoon vampire on the box. These barely lunchbox-sized M&M’s Cocoa Krispies Treats aren’t bad by any means, but they would be much better if they had those 5 things.
Okay fine. Just give me a bloodsucking Snap, Crackle, and Pop, and we’ll call it good.
The “Bowl:” Cocoa Krispies Treats with Milk Chocolate M&M’s Minis
The Breakdown: Momentary balloon bursts of noble cocoa gases are great, but uneven candy colonization and adult unfriendly serving sizes make for an ultimately forgettable Treat. We want vant Chocula!
The Bottom Line: 6.5 inevitable HitClips references that I’ll make tomorrow out of 10
(Quick Nutrition Facts: 90 calories, 0 grams of fiber, 7 grams of sugar, and <1 gram of protein per 1 bar serving)
***Editor’s confession: apparently this is, in fact, a lower score than the one I gave to Holiday M&M’s Minis Rice Krispies last November. This means I was either too deep in the Christmas spirit of giving, or my rule about preferring snacks coated in chocolate is a dirty lie. I apologize for this and will likely throw myself into an existential crisis as punishment.***