With Halloween just 2 days in the grave, you know what that means: time for food companies to go hog wild on marketing for the secularly ambiguous “holiday season.”
Or should I say “nog wild?” It’s about time we got an eggnog flavored cereal.
Now I love Thanksgiving just as much, if not more than the next guy—Mashed Potato-ism is my formally declared religion—but since we’re unlikely to see any turducken flavored cereals in the near future, it’s worth cutting straight to the red and green.
And while I’m not sure if these Rice Krispies Treats are new for 2015, please don’t tell me. I want to preserve the Christmas magic, as if these Treats were marshmallowy embodiments of Santa Claus himself. Let’s review!
With a tiny size no larger than that darn mouse who refuses to stir, these Blasted Rice Krispies Treats are bespeckled with even tinier red & green M&M’s. I’m sure Red, the M&M’s mascot, loves this time of year, because he finally gets to spend some quality alone time with Green. Keep it PG, you two.
The base Krispies Treat tastes like you would expect from a store-bought one. The marshmallowy gooeyness and glossy, buttery coating combine to produce a sticky treat that is occasionally sickly sweet. Unlike a homemade Rice Krispies Treat, these ones are a lot softer, with the butter flavor pretty much overwhelming any earthy rice flavor and dulling their former crispiness into more of a moist chew.
But it’s the M&M’s that make the experience worthwhile. Kellogg’s thankfully used the far superior M&M’s Minis, which have the power to end wars and bring about world peace with their deliciousness. Forget baseball: shotgunning down a plastic tube of those chocolate bad boys in 5 seconds is my greatest past time.
Scientifically speaking, it’s the higher shell to chocolate ratio that makes them so good, and their popping sugary shells and little bursts of super milky chocolate add smooth cocoa undertones to the straight butter and sugar of the Treats. More importantly, the crunch of the M&M’s provide a much-needed textural contrast to the limp Krispies.
But while everything here tastes perfectly pleasant, these Rice Krispies Treats really are a perfect metaphor for the holiday season. We build it up in our minds, and for a brief moment, we enjoy an overwhelmingly sweet blast of happiness. But then before we know it, it’s gone. And yet the unfulfilling nature of it still leaves us hungry for more. And we feel a little sticky, too.
Okay, maybe that last part doesn’t work quite so well for the holidays.
All in all, I liked these Rice Krispies Treats, but at times they were too sugary, and they were so light and un-filling that I would have to eat a whole box just to quell my Santa-sized hunger.
Note to self: leave old St. Nick a plate of beef and cheddar sliders this year instead. The coal I got last time must have been a hint to fire up the grill.
The “Bowl:” Holiday Rice Krispies Treats Blasted with Mini M&M’s
The Breakdown: A mix of hyper ‘mallowy Krispies and shell-heavy M&M’s makes for a cloying, ho ho ho-hum snack that would make a better stocking stuffer than a dessert.
The Bottom Line: 7 “Limp Krispiez” Limp Bizkit cover bands out of 10