Review: Malt-O-Meal Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites

Malt-O-Meal Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites Cereal Review Bag

Though they share a mother in milk, there are perhaps no other food pairings quite as harmonious and simultaneously anachronistic as cereal and cookies. One carries an entire nation’s breakfast connotations on its sugared back, while the other cloaks its doughy balls in the sinful jar of night. And yet, I can’t think of any one prepared treat that has inspired more cereals than the cookie, with its manifold masquerade of infinite options:

Oreo cereal. Nilla cereal. Even a modern holiday classic. I’ll admit this is a hollow victory, since the cookie clan certainly has such a broad definition. But hey, there are a ton of ice cream flavors out there, and with a few exceptions, cereals flavored like those suckers/lickers keep striking out.

Post & Malt-O-Meal (essentially creative twins, but one more literally thinks outside the box) are continuing the cookie’s never-crumbling reign by expanding their line of Cookie Bites even further. What started as a clear chip off the ol’ Cookie Crisp became Nutter Butter Cereal’s better half earlier this year. Now, it’s taking aim at the holiday season…a whole five months early?

I won’t question the business strategy behind dropping a snickerdoodle cereal in the summer, but all I’m saying is that if a cereal’s gonna celebrate Christmas in July, it better be offering me a steal of a deal on a used Kia Sorento. Continue reading

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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The Empty Bowl Episode Fifteen: Red, White, and Ineffective Camouflage for the Soggy War

Happy Independence Day to my American readers: may your day be filled with high-velocity hotdog eating, low-acceleration lazy rivers, and bowls of watermelon so deep you have to spoon chunks out of the juices, cereal style.

If you find yourself, your cat or dog overwhelmed by loud fireworks or Uncle Paul’s nonstop salvo of cannonballs, you can dive into the placid milky tides of The Empty Bowl Fifteen.

In this episode, Justin and I declassify Cap’n Crunch’s ever-expanding patriotic cereal campaign, lead a hemisphere-spanning investigation into two Mermaid cereals, and give a newcomer to the cereal world some first-day orientation.

Want to keep celebrating your independence from bad vibes? You can find more cereal free-for-alls at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but they all make me pledge my allegiance to you, the kind listener.

As a bonus, you can see what the Cap’n planned for my own holiday weekend. Measuring in at actually 34 pounds, this is by far the wildest cereal gift I’ve been delivered—and as a surprise, at that. Thanks again, Cap: but would it kill you to mix up some Crunch Berry White Claw I could fill it with?

Review: Toy Story 4 Carnival Berry Cereal

Toy Story 4 Carnival Berry Cereal Review Box

I’ll be honest, even though it’s been out for over a week, Toy Story 4 has not yet graced my ideas. It’s not (entirely) about it being an unnecessary sequel, and more about how I have to pee so often during movies that it leaves massive plot holes in my memory if the staff refuse to pause it for me.

And yes, I did once try to slip out to the restroom during The Last Jedi, accidentally opened the door to outside, and bathed the theater in an embarrassing flood of blinding hyperspace.

But here in the comfort of my own home, I can find cinematic relief through open relieving—all while eating cheap cereal instead of $11 kids’ snack boxes (the gummies are just so good!). So as I crack open a box of Toy Story 4 Carnival Berry Cereal, I’m forced to interpret the plot based entirely on this sensory breakfast experience.

So far all I’ve garnered is that during the film, the toys are blessed (or cursed?) with the ability to sprint across empty air—even in a five-alarm red void. Let’s hope the taste features more character development…

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Review: Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery’s Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some?

Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery Cookie Doughn't You Want Some Cereal Review Bag

Look, I’m all for cool (especially the literally cool) cereal collaborations, but I’m sensing an ulterior motive with this one.

Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery’s Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? is the latest in their ice cream cereal series, after Birthday Cake Remix and Our Strawberry Blonde. And it has to be a secret social experiment by Post (M-O-M’s parent company) to see just how long they can make a cereal’s full, legal name  before they drive snacky journalists wacky.

Well to that I say, nice try, but I’ll just turn it into an ugly acronym that actually takes more exertion to craft than typing it out.

So I know I really buried the lead here, but M-O-M&CSCCDYWS? is making a bold statement by claiming it contains cereal pieces actually flavored like cookie dough (while pairing them with marshmallows, but I doubt anyone in today’s marbit-fatigued zeitgeist really cares about that). There’s been little creativity in the chocolate chip cookie cereal scene as of late, ever since Keebler Cereal and its tragically puff-smothered cookie bits keeled over. That’s why there’s a lot riding on Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? to be more than just another Cookie Crisp chaser.

Now that I’ve told my spellcheck’s autocapitalization settings to not even bother, I can answer the in-sentence question Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? exists to ask:

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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

Spooned & Spotted: Cap’n Crunch’s Hero Crunch

Cap'n Crunch's Hero Crunch Dollar General Cereal Box

What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than with the Fourth patriotic Cap’n Crunch box to come out in the past two years?

Personally, I never expected last year’s mythically rumored and inscrutably unavailable Freedom Crunch to spread its wings once more, but now it’s reprinting its same red, white, and blue Crunch Berries like they’re state quarters.

This year, we saw the concept return in a milder, more bottle rocketed form, and just this month, we saw it debut with perhaps its most creative art yet—one that ditches the Cap’n’s stink eye in favor of one that borders on a Crunch-led assault against Independence Day alien invaders.

Finally, we have the above, Dollar General-exclusive Hero Crunch. This is perhaps the most bizarre case of an unnecessary product variant I’ve seen in four score and seven years, between the militant (and likely ineffective) camouflage and the unadorned Cap’n whose arm appears to be reverberating through space and time.

I mean c’mon, couldn’t they have at least given him a ghillie suit?

Our thanks to Gabe Fonseca for the photo. You can find Hero Crunch now at Dollar General—if it doesn’t blend into the shelves.

The Empty Bowl Episode Fourteen: Duped by Tapioca?

How does a meditative cereal podcast tackle what is perhaps the most fundamentally stressful cereal news story of the past year—if not past decade? Through the sentimental lenses of turquoise-tinted glasses.

Yes, on my and Justin‘s latest dive into the Cereal Milk Fountain of Youth, we break down the devastating breaking-down of a Kellogg’s classic, attempt to express cotton candy flavor in adjectives, and compare the parallel comforting energies of cereal/Grandma’s house.

Want to turn your workday into a Saturday morning? You can find more cereal sojourns at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but some do get stuck in my head like a good song.