Tag Archives: 9 rating

Review: Toasted Coconut Cheerios

New Toasted Coconut Cheerios Review Cereal Box

Listen, I’ve been cereal blogging for four and a half years now. After about two, adjectival creativity gets tough.

I mean, even for a concept as broad as cereal, there aren’t that many words to clearly convey its flavor without getting too hokey—which I still do, to the point of putting the wrong words in and taking the right words out before I shake the sentence all about.

Sweet. Buttery. Toasted. Crunchy. I pray for anyone who’s been diligently reading long enough to count how many times I’ve even stooped to using more idiosyncratic descriptors like “hedonistic,” “sugar soaked,” or “droolbending.”

Actually, wait, I should use that last one more.

Regardless, if cereal adjectives get stale, then specific flavor words are even worse. For example, after reviewing a lengthy patchwork of pumpkin spice products, I feel obligated to pay the hyphen in pumpkin-y overtime. And that’s nothing compared to the fines I owe Merriam Webster for unlicensed neologizing.

But there’s pumpkin spice, and then there’s coconut. At least PS has like five constituent spices I can rely on to split cloven hairs: once I use the phrase coconutty in this review, it’s all over for me…and there you have it. I’m all out of ideas. Well anyway, Toasted Coconut Cheerios are good. See you in the next one! Continue reading

Review: Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal

Kellogg's Cookies & Creme Pop-Tarts Cereal Review Box

Look, I know, deep down, that I am but a flake fragment stuck between two cogs within the grand corporate cereal machine, but can’t a crumb dream of being a marbit?

By this I mean: I seriously doubt anything I’ve written on this website has ever influenced a cerealsmith’s grand designs—though if Blueberry Muffin Toasters hits shelves, I will claim peripheral clout by right of Justinian association. But in my imagination, I like to pretend that something like Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal was made with a picture of me on an easel, connected with string to a bran map of all my favorite flavor descriptors.

Yes, that sounds narcissistic, but my birthday is next week, so give me a break.
And yes, I know, unsubtly mentioning my upcoming birthday isn’t much better.

C’mon though, a merger of Oreo O’s and Pop-Tarts? Sure, they could’ve picked any of my more-obscure, all-time favorite Pop-Tarts (Milk Chocolate Graham, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, or Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal Delight), but the only cereals more quintessentially dan g. would be a PB&J Waffle Crisp or Gingerbread Golden Grahams!

Ahem, Post and General Mills? Next week, remember? You’re not invited to my all-night laser tag lock-in without presents.

Okay, enough about me: let’s write about these little sandwich cookie pillows entirely in the second and third persons. Continue reading

Review: Vanilla Almond Raisin Bran Crunch

The more time passes, I think the more our society is not just normalizing raisin bran, but celebrating it. Gone are the days of clumsy bathroom humor. Gone is the Seinfeldian slander. And gone are the chronic misinterpretations of the stuff’s sugar content (the servings are heavier. heavier I tell you!)

Now, I like to believe that we as a culture can appreciate and thank our sun-dried stewards of more nutritionally substantive sweetness.

Even in our darkest hours, we’ve learned to praise the sun.

To evidence this, I’d point to the wealth of limited edition Kellogg’s Raisin Bran varieties we’ve seen lately, all of which have been arguably effective evolutions of the twice-scooped formula. Apple Strawberry hit us with an unexpectedly creative haymaker, while RB + Bananas boldly did what no lazy breakfaster has done before: acted on the diced-fruit “serving suggestion” seen on cereal boxes everywhere.

Vanilla Almond Raisin Bran continues that curiosity-driven tradition with a flavor pairing that’s more familiar, but perhaps more fitting. Rather than overtly fruity, V.A. takes R.B. back to some earthier thematic roots.

But enough mumblings about motif: let’s munch!

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Review: South Korean Oreo O’s RED & Peanut Butter O’s!

South Korean Oreo O's RED Cereal Review Peanut Butter Os Cereal Boxes

What better way to celebrate a special day than with two special cereals?

Or to be more sentimentally apt, what better way to celebrate the fourth anniversary of Cerealously.net than with a new variant of this blogger’s all-time favorite cereal?

Yes, it feels like I’ve preached the virtues of South Korean Oreo O’s so many times in the past four years that it borders on trite fanboyism at this point. But guess what? It’s my party, and I can gush about longitudinal variances in cocoa and marbit potency if I want to.

Especially since this occasion’s significance surpasses any individual’s milky milestone. Despite being voted the best Oreo O’s in their class by D.G. Power & Associates for the past half decade, South Korean Oreo O’s have never gotten a new flavor variant—a tragedy when we see just how lame America’s rebooted OO’s cinematic universe turned out.

Technically, there were Honey O’s bearing the aqueous mascot of Oreo O’s—a crossover we’ll see again later in the this article—but now the Oreo name and implied legacy officially endorse Oreo O’s RED, which is a Chocolate–Strawberry combo far more interesting than Golden or Mega Marbit Stuf’d.

In honor of Cerealously 4th birthday, I will humbly endure the jolly good burden of eating four bowls.

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Review: Peanut Butter Chex Cereal

General Mills New Peanut Butter Chex Cereal Review Box

Ever play Mario Kart? From Toadette to Bowser and every Birdo in between, the characters have three broad weight classes: light, medium, and heavy. Modern Chex cereals follow a very similar model, with each choosing to use a rice, corn, or wheat base, respectively.

Now I’m not saying that Donkey Kong would ever trade bananas for Wheat Chex, nor that there should to be a Chex Quest Kart in which Fred Chexter and various Flemoids do sick drifts through the Caverns of Bazoik—but it is very important that the respective density of each Chex variety complements the flavor glazed upon it.

For example, Blueberry Chex‘s rice base makes for great high-velocity munching, but the vaporous nature of the grain doesn’t ideally suit the equal subtleties of blueberry flavoring. That’s why when Peanut Butter Chex was announced with a Corn Chex base, I was excited to get my cob-nobbing mitts on a box. General Mills was kind enough to send me one, so it’s time to butter up and eat these babies rotary style.

(Those heathens who prefer to eat corn on the cob “typewriter” style are free to try and change my mind in the comments.) Continue reading

Review: Fillows Cereal (Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme and Pillsbury Cinnamon Roll!)

Hershey's Cookies n Creme & Pillsbury Cinnamon Roll Fillows Cereal Review Boxes

What would it take to end the Krave Civil War?

You know, the ceaseless, caustic conflict between those who love those graham-wrapped little choco-chrysalises (hi, it’s me) and those who think they taste like dog food (*ahem*). Such division doesn’t belong in the breakfast aisle, a demilitarized zone for those seeking unanimously sweet solidarity and shared cereal ceasefires. But what are we to do?

Should we pan-fry pieces of Krave to make them more palatable?
Barrel-age our Krave in Bailey’s to make it more…utilitarian?
Or must we Kravers acquiesce and bury all our polarizing cereal right next to the hatchet?

The answer’s far simpler: build a better filled pillow cereal. Which is just what General Mills has done with their aptly named Fillows line of cereals. These little cereal nuggets are filled with crème (though some sites have called it icing), and are currently only available at Walmart in family-sized boxes. But even though each box weighs over a pound—and features foil, rather than plastic, bags to properly secure their shimmering density—I don’t think you’ll need a family to finish it.

Just be ready to carry a food baby when you’re finished.

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Review: Tropical Froot Loops from Mexico!

Kellogg's Mexico Tropical Froot Loops Review Box

(Note: the box got a just a little dinged during its journey North. Must’ve been hungry carrier pigeons.)

Look, are we all just going to ignore the fact that, before Tropical Froot Loops, Toucan Sam clearly had no idea what fruit is?

And I’m not talking the layperson’s misclassification of pumpkins and tomatoes as vegetables—follow your nose deep into your noggin and try to remember the last time you heard Froot Loops’ lifelong spokesbird actually reference a real fruit by name. Lemonberries, starberries, wildberries: all ambiguous amalgamations of nature’s genuine bounty invented to hide the fact that “Froot” is much less of a natural flavor than it is a state of mind kids can tastefully chase outside the bounds of reality and into whichever adjacent universe where the grass is limeberry green and the fruit salads are crunchy.

[Though to Sam’s credit, his original iteration did wear a fruit-flocked Carmen Miranda hat. My two-pronged rebuttal to this is a) toucans can’t pass the mirror test, so he’s likely never recognized his own headgear, and b) the first Toucan Sam was undoubtedly throttled by the current Toucan Sam’s slenderly feathered man fingers.]

Thankfully, Froot Loops in Mexico largely preserve the two-dimensional Toucan Sam design of yore, though the worryingly articulate prehensility with which he’s gripping the Tropical Froot Loop on this box still leaves me concerned he’ll snap—or at least snap half the universe away. Continue reading

Review: Honey Bunches of Oats Apple Caramel Crunch

Post Honey Bunches of Oats Apple Caramel Crunch Cereal Review Box

You’ve heard of snack attacks, but what about sneack attacks?

No, that’s not a typo: I firmly believe that Honey Bunches of Oats has perfected the art of the 800-pound guerrilla breakfast bombardment. Not even counting the recent, off-brand and Internet-splintering news of Honey Brunches of Oats Chicken & Waffles Cereal, the now 30-year old cereal brand has a history of dropping sneakily scrumptious new flavors at the start of the year, without the preemptive fanfare we see from most crunch-slingers.

In 2016, the masters of crispy (fried poultry or otherwise) flakes and granola bunches brought back Chocolate Honey Bunches of Oats, and in 2018 we got the criminally underrated Pecan & Maple Brown Sugar HBoOats. Pulling another break-fast one on us, 2019 has now been blessed with Apple Caramel Crunch Honey Bunches of Oats.

More than just an exciting concept, this is only the second major caramel apple cereal after 2011’s bone-mealed Caramel Apple Boulders. Where caramel apple’s sister flavor, apple cinnamon, gets a lot of cereal aisle representation—including an apparently discontinued(?) Honey Bunches variety—I’m glad to see its stickier sibling finally getting exposure.

Even if it is half a year before caramel apple’s typical seasonal setting of booing and bobbing. Guess I’ll just have to cut some eyeholes in my winter-grade weighted blanket before eating.

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