Tag Archives: 10 rating

Review (x2): Hostess Honey Bun Cereal & Hostess Powdered Donettes Cereal

Hostess Honey Bun & Powdered Donettes Cereal Revies

To me, snack cakes are near-sacred totems. Arcane talismans that exude nostalgic simplicity and forbidden sweetness so concentrated that it can be hard to process for an adult stomach.

Ironic, since they’re so processed.

In more innocent times I gobbled Twinkies and Zebra Cakes with reckless abandon—I notoriously once went so far as to fit a whole Ho-Ho in my mouth on a self-administered dare. But now I merely visit them, usually in the convenience stores I consider their most fitting temples, gazing upon how impressively unchanged they are in a more health-conscious world that’s largely moved on without them.

So while I rarely partake in glazed glee any more, I’m excited that Hostess has teamed up with Post to turn two of its standout snacks into chibi cereal cakes. Granted, neither Honey Bun Cereal nor Powdered Donettes Cereal seem like obvious choices for the brand, but in a way, I’m glad: throwing chocolate and vanilla rings in a bag with marshmallows and calling ’em Cupcakes & Twinkies would’ve been too easy.

Geometric precedents aside, let’s return to the world of swirled cereal buns and curvaceous donuts. Dare me to shove a whole box in my mouth?

Continue reading

Review: 7-Eleven Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries Slurpee

7-Eleven Cap'n Crunch's Crunch Berries Slurpee Review

There are certain events in the cereal world that take on a great historic significance. Events that I end up referencing constantly in future reviews, party conversations, and poorly thought out wedding toasts.

In recent memory, a few spring to mind: the one-year resurrection of Frute Brute & Yummy Mummy monster cereals, the permanent revival of ’90s classics French Toast Crunch & Oreo O’s, and the documentary-worthy fall/rise of Tiny Toast & Honeycomb.

These events will no-doubt earn diagrams, if not call-out boxes in any future cereal history book. And after trying 7-Eleven’s infinitely hype-able Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries Slurpee, I’m convinced it deserves its own chapter, one worth driving all the way out to the only 7-Eleven in West Michigan to be a part of. Continue reading

Review: Malt-O-Meal French Toasters Cereal

Malt-O-Meal French Toasters Cereal Review Bag

Malt-O-Meal definitely lives in an alternate universe—an alternate timeline, if you will. In this version of breakfast reality, Cookie Crisp was less corny, Count Chocula never changed after the ’90s, and Post didn’t release Oreo O’s first—that’s like America losing the Space Race!

Oh, and French Toast Crunch’s squared form survived Y2K.

What do I mean? Well if you recall, French Toast Crunch—the clear ancestor of Malt-O-Meal’s French Toasters—started as bread shapes, changed to curved, Cinnamon Toast Crunch-like swirled squares, then disappeared (or at least disappeared to the Canadian tundras, where they remained available through 2012) until their 2015 rebirth. Yet now, here’s French Toast Crunch bizarro cousin, keeping tradition alive.

It took me too long to find this cereal (it came out a year ago—but my stores haven’t carried it until now. I blame the second coming of bread-shaped cereals), so I’m looking forward to some closure on my search for: it’s time to see if F. T. Crunch’s dark reflection (and I mean that in the best way) can keep its flavor modern.

Continue reading

Review: Malt-O-Meal Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch Cereal

Malt-O-Meal Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch Cereal Review Bag

This review goes out to you, 54-year old Larry P. from Tampa Bay, Florida.

You don’t actually exist, Larry, but you are an archetype of consumer both I and countless underpaid cereal customer service reps have had to deal with for the past two decades.

You’re the guy who complains on every Monster Cereal post about how Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry just aren’t as good as they were during your childhood growing up in some rural place that resembles the house from Courage the Cowardly Dog. You’re the guy who lambasts the cereals’ change from oat flour to corn flour as borderline cataclysmic, a harbinger of dark times that probably brought us reality TV and bluetooth headsets, too. And you use General Mills’ blog comments section as your impromptu soapbox.

So even though you are a persistently vocal one, Larry: you’re right. Oat flour does rock, and Malt-O-Meal’s newest cereal, Double Brownie Crunch, proves it with a masterful blend of fudged flours. Continue reading

Review: Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios Cereal from General Mills

General Mills Limited Edition Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios Cereal Review Box

I’ve long had a theory that every cereal a person could ever need can be formed through a triangulation of three “primary flavors.” The three corners of this Cerealluminati Pyramid (working title) are formed by chocolate, peanut butter, and strawberry. Think about it, sheeple people: while those three flavors are near-universally delightful by themselves, by pairing them you can make a choco-pb cereal, a PB&J cereal, or a chocolate fondued strawberry cereal.

And if you happen to find some hipster niche of cereal lovers that isn’t pleased by any of those, you can just combine all three and tear a rift in space-time through sheer flavor alchemy.

New Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios are proof that my philosophy of breakfast geometry isn’t so obtuse after all—in fact, it’s pretty acute. See, even though General Mills has a near-monopoly on chocolate peanut butter breakfast cereals with Reese’s Puffs, they still decided to release another cocoa-nutty product. That’s because, as a key bastion of my Cerealluminati Pyramid, the mouth-watering power of chocolate and peanut butter together really is that persuasively strong.

Unless, of course, my deeper conspiracy is true, in which case the prophecy of threes has yet to be fulfilled:

But allow me to trade in my tinfoil hat for an equally shiny spoonand dig in—if I’m gonna be a nutcase, I’d rather be a peanutcase. Continue reading

“Review:” Cap’n Crunch’s Christmas Crunch Cereal (2016)

Cap'n Crunch's Christmas crunch Cereal Box 2016 Review

It was like the plot of the world’s most surreal holiday special.

Last month, I shared candid photos of 2016’s gorgeously redesigned Christmas Crunch box, with the promise that I’d wait until late December to review it—to build anticipation, Christmas cheer, appetite, etc. My decision not to buy a sleigh’s worth of Christmas Crunch when it was right there in the store’s discount basket proved to be the most foolish thing I’ve done since trading away all my Oreo Cakesters for Bosco breadsticks way back in elementary school lunch time.

Because on December 22nd, driving around in the cloak of darkness while “We Need A Little Christmas” played with bitter accuracy on the radio, I couldn’t find a single box of Cap’n Crunch’s Christmas Crunch in stores!

Several discontented web searches later, I made a desperate phone call to an obscure local grocer who confirmed that they did indeed have a few boxes left. The magical angel who worked customer service even promised to set a box aside for me—I’d wager that he doesn’t hear many late night pleas for red and green breakfast products, so any chance to satisfy a sweaty-sounding dude’s simple, yet stupid Christmas wish was a no-brainer.

And that’s the story of how I ended up with a box of the exact same Christmas cereal I eat every year. Speaking of which, let’s take our spoons out for Ho-Ho-Horatio Magellan Crunch’s holiday classic, shall we? Continue reading

Classic Review: Waffle Crisp Cereal

Post Waffle Crisp Cereal Box

Despite the recent dawn of October, this review isn’t Halloween-themed. It is nostalgia-themed, though, and Halloween is a season of eternal nostalgia draped in a thin veil of sheet ghosts and dollar store cobwebs. There’s no better way to ring in the Month of Spook than by reviewing a cereal that’s as golden as the childhood memories it conjures up.

It’s Post’s much-beloved Waffle Crisp. I’ve been meaning to review Waffle Crisp for some time, and since I reviewed my other favorite childhood cereal last week, I wanted to keep the nostalgia ball* rolling with another classic I remember munching with reckless abandon before elementary school. My 8-year old self was convinced that if I poured my mountain of crunchy waffles high enough, I could hide in it and skip class.

*Oh, and if you’re wondering what a nostalgia ball looks like, it definitely looks like one of those foam Nerf Vortex footballs. Continue reading

Review: Oreo O’s Cereal (South Korea)

South Korean Oreo O's Cereal Box 2016

In the distant future, when all food is eaten in pill form and my great-grandkids ask me to describe the magic of breakfast cereal, I’ll oil my cyborg jaw motor and tell them about Oreo O’s.

I’ll tell them about the 10 glorious years America spent eating those cookies ‘n’ creme flavored rings. I’ll tell them about Oreo O’s 1997 introduction, orange-sprinkled Halloween Oreo O’s from 2000, and 2002’s marshmallowy Extreme Creme Taste Oreo O’s. I’ll captivate them with tales of sunglasses-wearing milk glob mascots who closely resembled PSY from Gangnam Style.

Then there’ll be a brief intermission as I explain what the heck Gangnam Style was. Seriously: I don’t know how it got over 2 billion views either, children of the future.

Then I’ll tell them about the tragic 2007 discontinuation of Oreo O’s. I’ll pause to build suspense, and then I’ll tell them about the legal loophole that allowed South Korean food manufacturer Dongsuh Companies Inc. to keep producing Oreo O’s as the rest of the world mourned the loss of milk’s favorite cereal. With my own eyes glistening, I’ll tell them about the E. coli contamination that forced Dongsuh to recall Oreo O’s in 2014, as well as the two-year Oreo O’s drought that followed—known globally as “The Second Dark Ages.”

But then I’ll finish with the story of Fall 2016, when an unexpected tweet from a Korean food account alerted me that the dawn of a new age was upon us. Continue reading