Review: Nutter Butter Cereal from Post

“What’s the best peanut butter cereal?” is perhaps one of breakfast’s most divisive questions—right up there with “is cereal a soup?”

(No, it’s not: soup is a concept, not a thing defined by its components. Please stop asking me.)

There are many who ardently support Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch. There are others who swear by Reese’s Puffs or new Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios (or at least, 50% of them). Some weirdos (like me) prefer the salted intricacies of Peanut Butter Puffins. And there are still others (me again) who desperately long for the return of JIF Cereal, going so far as to rally a posse of choosy moms to voice their cause.

But while peanut butter cereal has long been a small, yet hotly contested category, there’s a new contender in town, one with a long legacy of peanut butter snack cookie domination.

Yes, Nutter Butter Cereal is real, and it is debuting alongside Chips Ahoy! cereal to close a trilogy of “cerealized grade school cafeteria treat your mom used to carefully ration out in Ziploc bags, like seriously Ma, only two?”, a divine cereal lineage pioneered by the great creator: Oreo O’s.

Nutter Butter cookies have always been an aggressively peanut buttery cookie to me. So I’m not saying I want this cereal to gum my tongue to the roof of my mouth like tasty rubber cement, but if I’m left smacking my lips like a confused dog, I wouldn’t be upset. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, peanut butter, post. 25 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Cereal Time Cereals, by Gabe Fonseca!

If there’s one tangible distinction separating the rank of Cereal Knight from Cereal Master, it’s hand craftsmanship of one’s own cereal.

And while I once (keyword: once) tried baking my own “Golden Dan Grahams,” that particular odyssey ended with a smoking oven full of half-cooked honey cardboard crisps. So even though I may be on the Cereal Council, I’m okay with not being granted the rank of Master.

Because after receiving a surprise shipment of homemade cereals from Cereal Time historian Gabe Fonseca, I feel like a corn-puffed Padawan.

As an awe-inspiring holiday gift to a select crew of cereal lovers like me, Gabe made four cereals, complete with custom box art and prizes & trading cards inside. So as but a tiny, Chuck E. Cheese token-sized token of my gratitude—and in accordance with my responsibility as reviewer of all cool cereals—I’m gonna taste test them all. Because after taking just one look at his cosmonautical Neil deGrasse Tyson and Hunka Hunka Burning Monkey, I’m convinced these mascots could fit in on shelves next to the Trix Rabbit and Tony the Tiger.

Silly Neil: theoretical astrophysics is for kids! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: cereal time, cerealously, specials. 3 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Trader Joe’s Hot Cocoa O’s

Joe, Joe, Joe! Merry Christmas!

I know, I know, it’s crazy: even after a devilishly creative line like that, Trader Joe’s corporate still won’t hire me to write their Fearless Flyer. Well buckle, up, Josè, Joey, and Joseph, because your nativity-era copywriting ain’t getting any better than that!

In fact, I ‘d like to try writing a Fearless Flyer entry for the store’s newest cereal, Trader Joe’s Hot Cocoa O’s, before diving into the review. Let me just clear my keyboard—*ahem*:

It’s all fun and reindeer games until someone skips breakfast. So click-click-click on over to the cereal aisle to kick-kick-kick-off a merry day of snowball fighting and cookie dough munching in true winter style, as we turned a classic Yuletide flavor into a box of ho ho hoops and marshmallows. It narrowly beat out our second idea: Fruitcake-Frosted Coal Flakes.

Not bad, eh? Hopefully we can say the same for the cereal. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 4 rating, chocolate, holiday, trader joe's. 8 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Kellogg’s Donut Shop Chocolate Donut Cereal

I have to say, that of all the ring-shaped foods out there, I’m pretty glad doughnuts are the only ones that have been into not just one cereal, but several.

It’s not that I wouldn’t love to try a bagel, ditalini pasta, bundt cake, or onion ring: it’s just that I think the world at large, in its current state, is not ready to handle such concentric, near-Olympian power in their breakfast bowl. It’d be like if the Chaos Emeralds married the Dragon Balls.

Whew, hope you’re still reading after that horrible intro. My doughnut-based creativity has run drier than a stale cruller after talking so highly about Kellogg’s other Donut Shop cereal: Pink Donut. That stuff tasted like delightful animal crackers, so like Lard Lad, I’m already holding this Donut Shop Chocolate Donut Cereal to high standards.

But enough babbling, let’s get gobbling. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, chocolate, kelloggs. 3 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Quaker Gingerbread Spice Oatmeal

By this point, my obsession with gingerbread is well documented on this site—and probably by the Library of Congress, too.

So I’m not going to start this review of Quaker’s new Gingerbread Oatmeal (just one arm of their 2017 gingerbread menagerie, which also includes a cereal) by clobbering you over the head with my love for cloves, ginger, and molasses-y dough. Instead, I’ll segue in by briefly obsessing over my other favorite winter flavor: eggnog. In short…it’s great!

This delightfully spiced custardy concoction is coziness distilled, and now that my bucket list is one gingerbread cereal shorter, my new “dream cereal” has to be an eggnog one—preferably of the Toast Crunch variety—if only so that I can pour eggnog on my crunchy eggnog cereal and feel as giddy as a kid watching a G.I. Christmas Special on a Saturday morning Christmas Eve.

Or maybe that’ll just be the rum talking. Whatever: oatmeal time! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, gingerbread, holiday, oatmeal, quaker. 5 Comments

Dec. ’17

News: Vanilla and Strawberry Milkshake Pop-Tarts are Making a Comeback!

The people have spoken, and what they have said is, “we want Arctic dairy beverages distilled into rectangular toaster pastry form.”

Yes, after much clamoring from a cult of cow-juice junkies (in other words, fans), both Strawberry Milkshake Pop-Tarts and Vanilla Milkshake Pop-Tarts are coming back from whatever breakfast Hades Pop-Tarts shuffle off to when they’re discontinued from this mortal coil.

Both were originallky introduced in 2006 as part of Kellogg’s Ice Cream Shoppe line-up, which also included Ice Cream Sandwich Pop-Tarts—the fact that Kellogg’s morning necromancers skipped over that one will forever earn them my soft-served ire. And while Strawberry Milkshake got rave reviews and has since been the subject of countless Facebook petitions and annoying BuzzFeed nostalgia-holic listicles, I recall Vanilla Milkshake’s reception being more tepid—so I’m surprised to see it riding the coattails of its fruitier, more successful sibling.

Oh well, regardless, I’m triple-deckering both with a Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart to make a Neapolitan pastry sandwich sharply sweet enough to carve a portal in space-time straight between Michigan and Renaissance-era Naples.

Posted by dan g.. Categories: News. Tags: kelloggs, pop-tarts. 3 Comments

Dec. ’17

Rumor Mill: Two New Kashi Cereals, Coming Soon?

Waffle Crisp: the maple father, always present, always watching with a golden gaze.

French Toast Crunch: the sticky son, lost once, but resurrected thanks to a cult following.

And now, new Kashi Cinnamon French Toast: a holy syrup, created to enrich our sugar-loving lives with a cereal slightly more wholesome?

Forgive me for theologizing, but I love maple flavored cereals so much, that even the possibility of a healthy one has my heart sizzling like a freshly caked griddle. Long story short: when I was exploring the web’s deepest cereal caverns—an exploration that also turned up new Rice Krispies Treats and Super Mario Cereal—I happened upon this Kashi Cinnamon French Toast Cereal box, too.

These pillows look like Puffins, they’re flavored with real cinnamon and maple syrup, and they have plenty of fiber, but other than that, there’s nothing to say about this cereal yet that you can’t garner from staring at that very very enlarged to show texture cereal piece above. I won’t tell IT if you lick your screen.

But wait, there’s more! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: News. Tags: kashi, maple, peanut butter. 1 Comment