Tag Archives: 8 rating

Review: Magic Spoon Cereal

Magic Spoon Cereal Review Boxes

What happens when cereal grows up?

The Trix Rabbit starts moonlighting, doing Easter photoshoots at Michaels.
Sonny directs an autobiopic, starring Jack Nicholson, about his frequent, Cocoa Puff-inspired escapes from various insane asylums.
And Cap’n Crunch, of course, continues his storied 3000-year legacy as an immortal cereal centurion, subsisting solely on the blood of rejected unicorns harvested from the dumpster behind a Kellogg’s factory.

Yes, aging doesn’t pair with cereal quite as well as milk—my stomach is no longer lined with Nintendium, and The Weather Channel’s Saturday morning lineup isn’t quite as compelling. But Magic Spoon Cereal is out to change that: with flashy packaging and four flavors inspired by classic sweet stuff, this new cereal startup prides itself on having more protein and fewer carbs than mainstream cereals, with keto friendliness and no grains or gluten.

Now all who have seen what I’m capable of on this blog know that my only dietary restriction is my imagination (and, uh, lactose), so it wasn’t the healthy promises that drew me to these cereals. It was the eye-popping box colors that pretty accurately reflect my day-to-day wardrobe’s palette, plus the fact that people are apparently getting served ads for this stuff after visiting my site.

I’m honored to be a worthy track-factor for global cereal lovers, and I’m thankful to the folks behind Magic Spoon Cereal for sending me a full variety pack for review. So stuff your face with buckwheat and calzones while you can, because where we’re going, we won’t need grains.

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Review: Blueberry Cheerios

General Mills New Blueberry Cheerios Review Cereal Box

With Violet Beauregarde, one of the Blue Man Group guys (the quiet, sensitive one), and Paul Giamatti’s character Marty Wolf in the seminal 2002 classic film Big Fat Liar as my witnesses, I will never stop preaching the good word of Kellogg’s Fruity Snacks—specifically the blueberry ones.

Ever since Scooby-Doo fruit snacks, another object of my analogical fixation, changed their packaging and recipe for the worse, Kellogg’s Fruity Snacks are undoubtedly the best bite-sized bits of gelatin you can find in the Snacks, Etc. aisle. In fact, I’d say they’re third in my personal gummy candy fandom, surpassed only by blue sharks (essentially blueberry Fruity Snacks that’ve evolved predatory instinct) and Venus de Milo herself.

Yes, the potently juicy flavor of each Kellogg’s Fruity Snack, be it straw-, rasp-, or blueberry, is both refined and instantly recognizable. But it’s that last cerulean snack—which I also love for looking like a video game mana potion—that I’ve most wanted to see translated into a cereal again. Too often in mixed berry cereals, the flavor scientists paint the whole flavortown red, giving little leeway for the subtlety of blueberry to shine through. Yet every time there’s been an exception, the result is wonderful—even if it inevitably results in discontinuation, too. Whether they’re Tiny Toasts (turned Toast Crunches) or Muffin Tops that inspire sponsored meals, blueberry cereal is a refreshing, yet underrated experience—much like the first swing set underdog during a brisk late-fall recess.

The moment I heard about Blueberry Cheerios, I hoped this was my chance to taste blueberry gummy jam spread across toasted grain once more. So no pressure, General Mills: but if you get this one wrong, you’ll have to sculpt me a gummy Dionysus as penance.

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Review: Baked AF Cereal Box Bundt Cakes

Baked AF Cereal Bundt Cakes Review

7, 13, 42, 69: different cultures have deemed just about every number as “lucky” over the ages, but for my Honey Bunches of Money, no numeral quite brings peace like a dozen: I mean, it’s got zen right in the name! And when I gaze upon twelve doughnuts, mini bundt cakes, or fluid ounces of coffee mixed with Snickers* creamer**, I can’t help but feel my anxieties abdicate my abdomen to free up precious real estate for doughy delight.

That’s why, when the aptly named DJ Baby Bundt Cake on Twitter offered to mail me a dozen of his bakery Baked AF‘s new cereal-inspired confections, I couldn’t help but start raking my front yard into a zen garden whilst camped out catching koi in Animal Crossing, all in anticipation of the coming mail carrier, who would bestow a satchel of divine delicacy upon me like an unknowing bodhisattva.

*I don’t mess around when it coming to doughnut dunking.
*I also colloquially call this dense nectar “Thickers Coffee Creamer.” Continue reading

Review: Rice Krispies Treats Snap Crackle Poppers (3 Flavors!)

Kellogg's Rice Krispies Treats Snap Crackle Poppers Review Pouches

What makes a balanced breakfast?

Cereal commercials will have you believe it calls for toast, fruit, milked cereal, another glass of milk, maybe like a sausage?, and some OJ for good measure. Despite such a figurative feast’s skewed carbo-hydrating to protein ratio, it’s still probably a better balanced breakfast than what I had in mind: a bowl of Rice Krispies in one hand and Cocoa Krispies in the other—each precariously perched on a card-tower of respective Confetti Cupcake and Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts.

Perfectly balanced, as all impending stomachaches should be.

That said, I’m really excited to work Kellogg’s new Rice Krispies Treats Snap Crackle Poppers into my balanced breakfast. Why, you ask? Because they’d make quite the square meal.

Nothing quite like 100 words of buildup to a two-word punchline. Anyway, for those still with me after that egregious comedy sin, it’s time to do some sweet penance: a three-part munchline of creamily coated and cubed Rice Krispies! Continue reading

Review: Frosted Crisp Apple Pop-Tarts

Kellogg's Frosted Crisp Apple Pop-Tarts Review Box

Wait, what the heck are these big flat things?

Steamrolled Pop-Tarts Bites? Stretch Armstrong-ed Pop-Tarts Crisps? The assimilated sentience of several dozen Pop-Tarts Cereal pieces?

Oh, right: I remember those retro rectangles now. Original Pop-Tarts—or OG PTs, as the kids may very well say—were what Kellogg’s used to make way back in 2018, before they seemingly decided to infuse essential Pop-Tart oils into every other snack product imaginable.

But after three spin-offs (that are really re-educated old school products), Pop-Tarts has finally released a new full-sized pastry, too (even if it’s really the latest in a long, long line of its kind). It’s called Crisp Apple, and it foregoes much of the flamboyant detailing of its apple’d ancestors in favor of a simplistic sauce blanche, almost exactly like that seen on Apple Blast Pop-Tarts—a flavor available in the U.K. since 2014.

But will this version be as American as apple handpies, or will its apple fall a few furlongs too far from its frosted family tree? Let me untwist my tongue and put it to work.

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Review: Chocolate Toast Crunch (2019)

Chocolate Toast Crunch Cereal Review Box

What cosmic breakfastian powers command the scales of cereal justice? Which ancient grain gods and granulated goddesses hold court over the eternal fates of discontinued cereal souls, reanimating some amd leaving others in cultically revered purgatory?

Well whoever they are, they’ve got some explaining to do: it’s been nearly half a decade since the heyday (and collapse) of the 2000s’ Toast Crunch empire, and the General Millsian pantheon has only just now resurrected a second member of that power trilogy.

Let me explain—I firmly believe the first of the Toast Crunch’s Y2K success stories to return was not reborn directly. No, Frosted Toast Crunch (2012-2015) must have had its powdered sugar-dusted soul reincarnated in the form of Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch. By binding Frosted Toast Crunch’s might to a seasonally limited plane, this ho-ho-glow up made its predecessor frostier, butterier, and infinitely more loveable.

So now that we’re seeing the total return of the youngest Gen Z Toast Crunch, Chocolate (2013-2016), it begs an eternal question: where is the first among them? Where is my beloved Peanut Butter Toast Crunch? It debuted in 2004 to wide acclaim, even making a brief 2013 re-appearance after its first 2006 retirement. So while I’m ready to dive into these Chocolate Toast Crunch squares with cocoa gusto, it will inevitably leave me hoping for another spiritual successor to PB…

…one that merges its ghostly life energy with that of recently departed Strawberry Toast Crunch.

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Review: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros Cereal

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros Cereal Review Box

There’s an old adage in the breakfast and breakfurious business of cereal: K.I.C.S., which of course stands for Keep It Cinn-ple Stupid.

The Toast Crunch family of cereals is many things: necromantic, with its obsessive reanimation of old products. It’s viral, as the cereal’s cinnamon-spiced squares infect products with only a tertiary connection to the cereal medium. And the Toast Crunches are borderline mythological, as one of their kin is seemingly set to rival Santa Claus in seasonal popularity (at least according to short surveys given to a small sample of IHOP parking lot-dwellers [my people!]).

Yes, these cereals are a complicated brood set on cereal domination. But they’re also clever, because they always keep things cinn-ple. Whether it’s actual Cinnamon Toast Crunch products or a fruity family tree outcrop, every T.C.-ereal know what strategy works for them, and they stick to it: sticking a flour sack’s worth of confectioner’s sugar-textured flavoring formula to pieces that are already mildly (but not distractingly) sweet, a 1-2 combo that could make even an End Piece of the Loaf Toast Crunch sound appealing.

Butt, I digress. New Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros are interesting by design, because you, like I, may think on the surface that it’s just a lazy reimagining of an old flavor, stolen from Post. Yet its fascination comes from the question of whether Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s heavenly ghost of cereal dust can survive on an airy puffed piece without its decades old shell of squared crisped wheat/rice. If so, how long before these noodly Churros grow arms?

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Review: Wild Harvest Blueberry Walnut Cereal

Wild Harvest Blueberry Walnut Cereal Review Box

The breakfast aisle is guerrilla warfare. We have Malt-o-Meal cranking out hit after hit while Aldi’s in-house brand drops the surprise bomb of the holiday season. What the Cuphead is going on here?! I’m having ancestor-flashbacks to when an imitator started dressing like Hydrox and soon became America’s Favorite Cookie. So please, stick with me for a moment while I argue that the future very likely rests on the shoulders of companies we don’t even recognize.

Sometimes, I take a trip to the local hippie grocery chain to see what’s up in the world of avant granola. It was during one such venture that I spotted this perplexing bit of cerealia perched high up on a shelf in the ill-defined “healthy cereal” section. It stood out amid Barbara’s Puffins and Kashi GoLean because, more so than any other probiotic, low-sugar, organic, gluten-free, paleo, vegan option with 1000% of your daily fiber, the minimalist art shouts “wholesome.” Screams it. Through a megaphone. While standing in front of a celery poster. This is box art that could make Teddy Ruxpin burst into apologetic tears for not giving enough warm hugs to orphans.

Meet Wild Harvest, a brand with barely any discernible history or footprint in the marketplace. The enlarged image on their milquetoastly-named Blueberry Walnut Cereal looks a lot like one of the many pretenders to the Honey Bunches of Oats lineage. An investigation of the copyright reveals that Wild Harvest is an imprint of SuperValu, Inc. Inspired by Dan’s recent tumble down the rabbit bowl, I checked more into it. Here’s hoping I don’t need a secret handshake to get in. Continue reading