Milk? Never heard of her. Is that some fermented barnyard beverage, like a cow-bucha?
I mean, it’s 2020: we’ve got more viscous things to pour over our cereal. While many make a New Year’s resolution to get thinner, there’s a skim-to-none chance that I don’t spend the year progressively thickening my breakfast additives.
Case in point: new Yoplait Trix & Cinnamon Toast Crunch Smoothies, two chuggable recontextualizations of popular cereals that are likely not meant to join their namesake noshes in bowl-y matrimony—though I am hellbent on doing so anyway. These bottles come four to a clumsily constructed cardboard pack (seriously, put these in a separate bag or you’ll end up bungling a liter of chilled Trix sauce down your front steps), and conveniently contain exactly enough smoothie to douse a bowl of cereal.
But of course, I must slug ’em back raw before any experimentation. So forgive me as I make whatever wretched noises accompany the process of “opening up one’s throat.” Continue reading →
Or at least I do. I love all bits, whether it’s exponentially sugar-fortified cereal dust, forgotten salt-stewed French fry-lets, or the last messy bite of a restaurant meal that you saved as a parting gift for yourself after boxing up the rest of the leftovers—the very same last bite you had to awkwardly tell the waiter you were saving as he’s midway through lifting the plate from your desperate mitts. Or maybe that’s just me.
No matter how you spin it, I’ll always love bits more than pieces. Well, unless it’s those honey mustard and onion pretzel pieces. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my strange bit-diction stems from a long childhood relationship with Timbits: those lovable lil totally-not-doughnut-holes from Tim Hortons that just about any teacher who had a hope of winning their class’ trust would bring in by the party pack-ful on syllabus day.
Though Tim Hortons and his namesake ‘bits were a source of warm nostalgia for my fellow Michiganders, the coffee chain is a more deeply in-granulated cultural epicenter in its country of origin, Canada. So it makes sense that the first ever Timbits Cereal would be released exclusively north of the states—even if I firmly believe my mitten of origin should be considered an annexed state of the Hortonian Empire. Thanks to Cereal Time’s Gabe Fonseca, I was able to secure boxes of both Timbits Cereal flavors, Birthday Cake and Chocolate Glazed.
So let’s all grab a coffee, PBR coffee, or perhaps some strange soup of poutine and Labatt Blue and see if these itty bitty Timbits are a slam dunk. Continue reading →
For those without this very specific genetic disposition to oddly specific early Internet web cartoon references, Cheat Commandos…O’s are a cheap cash-in on an already merchandized-by-design franchise. And to this day, I can’t figure out which cereal they used to model it—perhaps it’s actually dried macaroni and cheese, or perhaps the petrified remains of a shredded Bronco Trolley.
Much like Cheat Commandos, Shopkins is a line of toys, apparel, and by this point (probably) orthodox faiths. In short: it consists largely of blind bag toys shaped like sentient grocery items. In long: yo dog we heard you like shopping so we put consumer goods in your consumer good so you can spend food money on fake food that implicitly costs fake money, too.
Granted, I’m not judging the ouroboric commercialism that Shopkins embodies—heck, I think the adjacently themed ’80s Food Fighters are some of the best-looking action figures in history. Though it is a shame they never made a grizzled bowl of cereal armed with a tactical bootspork.
Shopkins is just something I’m far too old for, admittedly, but I’m nevertheless hesitant any time a beloved brand of non-cereal ends up emblazoned on the front of a dubiously flavored hot pink rectangular prism. Licensed cereals are usually hit or miss or impermissibly lame. Even those remembered fondly, like Pokémon Cereal, are almost always retrospectively delicious because they’re acceptably executed bootleg Lucky Charms—with prettier marbits than the heretical excuses for freeze-dried sugar they put in such licensed cereals nowadays.
At least Shopkins’ new Cutie O’s Cereal has a relatively original flavor. Outside of one juicy box of Raisin Bran, apple and strawberry make for a rare pairing—though we are starting off on the wrong plastic footlong, as my lifelong penchant for strawberry kiwi has me Pavlovianly drooling venomous vitriol at the sight of a green-fruited competitor to my mental “Best Capri-Sun” throne. But alright, Kawaii Granny Smith: I’ll sheathe my ceremonial paring knife while you state your case. Continue reading →
Anybody else got weird, yet oh-so-satisfying ways to eat food? And I don’t mean any particular combination of foods—though I will proudly die on the Pringles with Ketchup Hill, as it’s where my family plot will be.
No, I’m talking unconventional approaches to the physical act of eating something. Sure, there are classics, like unscrewing and licking an Oreo clean or consuming Snickers with a fork & knife. And there are more disturbing ones, like those who eat kiwis with the fuzzy flesh on, or the worryingly confident breed of Fun Dip consumer who eats the sticks totally unadorned.
Personally, I like to eat completely around the cookie part of a Twix to save it for last, consume a handful of popcorn like an apple, and more-than-occasionally swallow pasta noodles whole for the unique tracheal imprint left by each respective shape. Oh, and I used to unknowingly eat Reese’s Cups with the paper still on until an embarrassingly mature age.
Pop-Tarts are far from immune from this sort of nuanced noshing. While my formerly frowned-upon habit of freezing toaster pastries has now been largely normalized (you’re welcome), I still know many who will nibble around the crust before handling the sweet meat of the matter. This may be less barbaric (albeit less creative) than eating the insides before the crust, but either way these folks are depriving themselves of the blessed balance struck at the baked-in slip fault between frosting and crisped crust.
No, now that I’ve eaten Chocolatey Fudge Pop-Tarts Bites, I believe there is a better way: one that may be difficult to scale up to a regular Pop-Tart, but which ought to nevertheless cleave your breakfast time traditions in twain. Continue reading →
Is it just me, or does “marbit” sound an awful lot like “varmint?”
I’m not saying I don’t like what is perhaps cereal’s single most iconic component, but the mythical munchability of freeze-dried marshmallows, at least to me, has been their scarcity. The Biblical parable of the child who carefully picked all the marshmallows out of his Lucky Charms, only for his father to make him eat the soggy oats alongside the family donkey still rings true: “he who hems and haws makes himself an ass.”
Uh, I think that’s the…unreleased fifth letter to the Corinthians. You wouldn’t know it: Paul wrote it at a different school.
So much did I enjoy the rare treat of breakfast marshmallows as a child that I feel spoiled now—or at least my appetite is. Every cereal from Apple Jacks to Frosted Flakes is chucking marshmallows into classic cereals with no respect for tradition, boundaries, or mouthfeel. And now they’ve gotten to Trix, too. A cereal that has never been paired with marshmallows before this year of Twenty-Silly-Bunny.
It’d be a low-hanging comedic fruit to say it feels like the cereal industry is Trolling us with all these clumsily composed marshmallow cereals, but I will say that, thanks to the Trolls 2: World Tour branding on these Trix, I’m marginally more optimistic about the concept. Because while I deeply, even spiritually prefer the Trix fruit shapes to spheres, I will admit that swirled spheres are aesthetically pleasing enough to thread onto a friendship bracelet.
If I made two, how fast do you think UPS could get one to the Corinthians? Or at least, The Corinthian? I’ve had eyes for him for a while. Continue reading →
In 2020 we’re staying honest with those we love, so I’m gonna come right out and say it:
Honey Bunches of Oats, how in your infinite wisdom have you made the most tearable cereal bags in the breakfast aisle?
There are already enough things in this world that I have trouble pulling apart without blunder nor bother: perforated notebook paper, most pieces of mail, command strips off a wall. My delicious cereal shouldn’t fissure and fizzle out cereal spillage at a moment’s notice.
This is difficult to cope with, especially since Honey Bunches of Oats is a) built on a near spiritual trinity of corn flakes, frosted corn flakes and granola bunches, but this triple blessing is also b) very consistent atproducingflavorfulvarietals.
(We don’t talk about the less savory‘Zilla’98s of the franchise.)
Yet HBoO’s latest release—whose bag was torn asunder by inescapable fate—seems, to me, to be its ostensibly least original idea in recent memory (with one notably irrelevant example). Simply culling one third of the cereal, coating it with sticky sauce, and shoving it back in the mix? As someone who values a good novelty cereal, from the start I’m skeptical. Will this be the equivalent of a bubbly Disney remake that’s so saccharine it crashes lifelessly?
At least give us some crudely handsome CGI bunches at that point! Continue reading →
I’m not saying Hershey picked one of the lamest, most ironically vanilla word for the union of impassioned lips, but plain ol’ Hershey’s Kisses? Even the white chocolate Hugs light a hotter fire under my stomach. But perhaps it’s just my own deep-seated disinterest in purely unadorned and lower-mid quality milk chocolate—especially when sculpted into a dainty form that a) always has its fragile tips break, and b) leaves behind a wholly unnecessary second wrapper component in the form of an annoying miniature fortune cookie fortune. One that never changes.
Despite all this, I’ll try my best to set aside these misgivings (that likely stem from the unendingly obnoxious death knell of the Kisses Christmas commercial) to impartially review Hershey’s Kisses Cereal, a creation that somehow dances around every other erotically nougated candy at the party to Kiss the chocolate frog in the corner, who ends up transforming into a cereal that looks something like, uh, this: Continue reading →
Probably because crustular isn’t a real word, let alone an FDA-approved one. Though one could consider it an antonym of ‘cromulent.’
Pop-Tarts varieties have gotten wilder than a berry in recent years, with a number of crazy flavors and gimmicks that weren’t necessarily crazy good by extension. But through it all, Kellogg’s wasn’t able to open up their third eye to see the true opportunity for creativity that lies in a Pop-Tart’s largely unmodified third component—arguably the most fundamentally important component. The crust.
I struggle to think of many Pop-Tarts with crust that tastes like anything more than “classic puff pastry” and “chocolate puff pastry.” There’s Red Velvet, but that’s really just clown chocolate. Perhaps the only worthy ancestral analogue I can think of for these crust-bending Pretzel Pop-Tarts would be Kellogg’s line of weirdly wonderful Peanut Butter Pop-Tarts. With a more crumbly and baked-cookie-esque crust, that trilogy of PB, Choco PB & PB&J cemented themselves as an unforgettable, holy trinity of revelatory revolutions in Pop-Tarchitecture.
So why did it take Kellogg’s so long to break the expensive factory mold again?
And was it worth it?
