Seriously guys, we have to talk about Peanut Butter Chip Mates.
Generic brand cereals are often seen as the crunchy butts of every breakfast table joke (I just wanted to type the phrase “crunchy butts”). Even though they are the breakfast of champions on a budget, these obvious rip-offs have goofy names like “Honey-Nut Scooters” and “Crispy Hexagons,” as well as sub-par flavors that melt away faster than a muffin in a rainstorm.
And yes, I’ve seen a muffin in a rainstorm before. It ain’t pretty.
But not Peanut Butter Chip Mates. No, Peanut Butter Chip Mates doesn’t need your pity, nor will it ask for it.
Peanut Butter Chip Mates is here to slap those preconceived notions about store brand cereals right out of you.
Peanut Butter Chip Mates is here to slap you so full of doughy peanut butter cookie flavor that you’ll be on your knees in front of a box of Marshmallow Mateys, begging for forgiveness. Continue reading →
That’s right, fellow cerealists, the greatest day of the year has come once more! March 7th is National Cereal Day, and it’s better than 25 Christmases stuffed into a Thanksgiving turkey that’s been strapped to a 4th of July firework and launched into a jack-o-lantern carved to look like the Easter bunny.
Today, cereal munchers everywhere are paying loving tribute to the fun, delicious, and ever-nostalgic breakfast classic that faithfully serves us 365 days a year (or 366, on years like this one).
Since Cerealously was only born in July of 2015, this is our first National Cereal Day as a blog. Despite this, I want to do a brief throwback to National Cereal Day 2015, when General Mills sent a few lucky cereal fans this rockin’ jigsaw puzzle that is way too cool not to share with the Internet.
I will say, though, that even though this jigsaw puzzle is cool, it was difficult enough to put together that Jigsaw from Saw must have been the one who designed it. If you can imagine a slightly sweaty grown man hunched over and swearing while trying to fit a Lucky Charms horseshoe piece into a Cheerio-shaped hole, you wouldn’t be far from the truth.
In reality, I was much sweatier.
This year, General Mills teamed up with the Food Network’s Justin Warner to develop a bunch of exclusive cereal recipes. I’d love to make one, like the above Trix Sunrise Chill Pie, but we all know that my “baking session” would end 10 minutes later with me passed out on the kitchen floor, face down in a puddle of milk with a half-eaten box of Trix spilled around me like fruity crime scene giblets. You can check out this and other recipes here.
Meanwhile, no National Cereal Day would be complete without a contribution from Gabe Fonseca, a friend of Cerealously and a binge watchable cereal YouTuber. Gabe made this awesome tribute video for his channel, which features a whole bunch of cool people sharing their favorite cereals. Look closely, and you might even catch yours truly in the video.
Just don’t blame me if my face makes you go blind.
But Gabe isn’t the only one who’s ever asked me what my favorite cereal is. In fact, I get asked it so often, that I wanted to properly celebrate National Cereal Day here on Cerealously by counting down not 1, not 5, and not even 8.125 of my favorite cereals. No, it’s time to rank my Top 10 Cereals of All Time!* Continue reading →
Krave is a divisive cereal. Most people either think it tastes like dog food, or they wolf it down like hungry canines at chow time.
Personally, I love the stuff…with milk. When munched straight out of the box, Krave is usually too bland and mealy for my tastes. But with the addition of milk, each piece becomes a soft, biscuity chocolate lava cake, oozing with fudgy goo.
That’s why I had doubts about trying this Krave cereal bar. Would I end up having to inject it with a syringe full of 2% to make it palatable?
But then I saw the word “brownie,” and my fears went away. The word “brownie” conjures up happy images of Grandma’s homemade dessert and cheerful Girl Scouts peddling delicious, definitely not homemade dessert cookies.
So I had to give it a try anyway. With a name like Smucker’s Brownie, it has to be good. Right? I’ll still make sure to have the nurses prepare a Nesquik IV drip, just in case. Continue reading →
Just keep staring. Just keep staring. Just keep staring.
…aaaand, I’m blind.
Photos don’t do it justice, but this box of Finding Dory cereal is bright. I think the shiny holographic box design could even bring down planes if angled correctly in the sunlight.
Your move, TSA.
In fact, the distracting solar flare of this cereal box is the only reason I’m reviewing it at all; I was attracted to it in the grocery store like a moth to a flame. Or perhaps like a guppy to an angler fish. Or maybe even like a kid to one of those oil puddles that reflects neat rainbows.
I usually just sit back and make fun of generic oats and marshmallows movie tie-in cereals, but truth be told, I haven’t actually tried one in awhile. Maybe my laughter is unwarranted. Maybe there’s a tasty reason Kellogg’s has rehashed this formula time and time again.
So here’s your shot, Kellogg’s. Dazzle me with that Pixar magic. Continue reading →
Well, looks like it’s time to renew my monthly subscription to HBO. And no, I’m not talking about getting my Game of Thrones fix—I mean Honey Bunches of Oats! With two new episodes in cereal squire Gabe Fonseca’s Cereal Time YouTube series, we wanted to share both with you. Cereal Time takes an in-depth look at a different cereal lineage each week, and it’s chock full of vitamins, minerals, and occasionally King Vitaman.
Honey Bunches of Oats takes the honey-soaked stage first. As Gabe describes, Honey Bunches of Oats have humble beginnings, ever since 1986 when good ol’ Vernon Herzing first mixed 4 different Post cereals into a single Frankenstein’s cereal monster (not to be confused with Franken Berry, of course). Honey Bunches first started as “Battle Creek Cereal,” and even though I’m a Michigan native and would have loved for that name to catch on, it was the much more literal “Honey Bunches of Oats” that finally stuck (both literally and metaphorically: honey is sticky!).
Maybe “Battle Creek Cereal” sounds too much like a cereal killer horror movie. Continue reading →
I find the concept of breakfast bars to be fascinating. All the magic of cereal distilled and molded like sugary Play-Doh into portable, rectangular chunks? They’re the next best thing to carrying around a heart-shaped locket with Toucan Sam’s face inside.
At the same time, I yearn for a simpler era of breakfast bars. I yearn for the days when our only option was bits of actual cereal haphazardly Elmer’s glued together by a sweet, gelatinous white goo that could somehow legally be called “milk.”
But now we live in an era of protein and quinoa and whatever the hell “activated almonds” are. So I’ll happily review one more Kashi Plant-Powered Bar, but I’ll do it with a nostalgic yearning for a simpler time—a time when I accepted a dare to eat just the milk layer of a cereal bar and spent the rest of the dazed afternoon unsure what century it was. Continue reading →
Just look at those swirls. Imagine them hypnotically spinning: spinning, twirling, and careening down into your cereal bowl.
You’re getting very, very hungry.
It’s been a relatively slow month for new cereal, so while I continue eagerly hunting for Post’s new Marshmallow Pebbles, I think it’s time I gave a cinnamon-seasoned cereal veteran a proper vetting.
And since the tempting spirals in this box of Kellogg’s Cinnabon cereal have been beckoning me like crunchy sirens for awhile now, they seem like good review candidates.
Maybe now I won’t have to eat bowls full of Taco Bell Cinnabon Delights and milk. I hear that’s how they finally killed Rasputin. Continue reading →
Maplemania: a disease that has afflicted many, myself included. It’s native to Canada and and regions of Vermont, and symptoms of this affliction include relentless addiction to syrup-drenched pancakes, habitual licking of maple trees, and compulsive urges to bathe in tubs full of milk-soaked Waffle Crisp.
Recommended treatment is a continual IV drip of Grade A Dark Amber. Or, you know, maybe just a bowl of Peace Cereal’s Maple Pecan Clusters & Flakes cereal. The cereal claims to be flavored with real maple syrup, but will it properly sedate a maplemaniac like me?
Seriously guys, we have to talk about Peanut Butter Chip Mates.
