Tag: Cereal

REVIEW: Limited Edition Peach Cheerios Cereal

Denis 4 Comments

Peach Cheerios Cereal

Do you stay up at night wondering what the next new flavor of Cheerios might be? I certainly don’t, but if I did it would take me many, many nights before I’d guess peach as the next flavor of the iconic oat cereal.

Not that there’s anything wrong with peaches. Despite being the only fruit honored in a state nickname (Georgia, for those who didn’t pay attention in geography class), peaches don’t get much love when it comes to cereals.

There are plenty of options with apples and a plethora of berries (including two of my favorites, Boo and Franken). But if peaches are your thing, there haven’t been many options, save for a few with peaches in a supporting role. That is until now with the introduction of Peach Cheerios.

The Cheerios folks have already covered the obvious flavors with fruit variants including apple, banana, strawberry, very berry and “fruity,” plus the ubiquitous chocolate, peanut butter and cinnamon. The makers of Cheerios have even been a little daring and gone outside of the cereal box, so to speak, with Dulce de Leche Cheerios, a flavor similar to caramel. And of course, Honey Nut Cheerios has been a popular flavor for many years. Even though Cheerios had pretty much tapped all the major cereal-friendly fruits, the choice of peach still seemed a little odd to me, but after tasting it, also a pretty brilliant one.

Peach Cheerios Cereal 2

Some cereals pack a flavor punch that hits you right in the face, but Peach Cheerios provide a much subtler taste, almost a sweet kiss on the cheek. It’s not overpowering at all, but there’s just enough flavor to add a pleasant hint of peaches, along with a nice peachy aroma.

If you find regular Cheerios to be a little too oaty (or oatey; spellcheck is not giving me a thumbs up on either one so I’m making up words, I guess) and a bit too bland, then you might really like this slightly sweetened version. It’s certainly not a dramatic departure from regular Cheerios with a slightly pinker color and a light glaze of peachiness, but the latter makes all the difference.

Peach Cheerios Cereal 3

My only disappointment is that the addition of milk didn’t produce the peaches and cream taste I thought it might, but instead it seemed to almost wash away a bit of the peach flavor. It was still good with milk, just not quite as good as eating them naked. To be clear, I am referring to the Peach Cheerios being naked, not me. At least as far as you know.

And here’s a random tidbit: It turns out Honey Nut Cheerios don’t contain nuts, but the name isn’t a complete lie as they do contain honey. So, does Peach Cheerios contain peaches? Well, if you consider “peach puree concentrate” to be peaches, then yes. It’s also “flavored with other natural flavors,” whatever that means. The bottom line is that it’s a solid addition to the Cheerios family.

(Nutrition Facts – 3/4 cup – 110 calories, 15 calories from fat, 1.5 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 125 milligrams of sodium, 120 milligrams of potassium, 22 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 8 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $2.87
Size: 23.2 oz. box
Purchased at: H-E-B
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Nice sweetness and taste without being overpowering. You can eat them naked.
Cons: Doesn’t provide a peaches and cream flavor with milk, although it might if you used actual cream. Only here for a limited time.

REVIEW: Limited Edition Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp Cereal

Meghan 5 Comments

Limited Edition Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp Cereal

I think that it’s pretty much every kid’s dream to get to eat dessert for breakfast every morning. At the same time, I think that it’s also pretty much every parent’s dream to get their kids to eat something at least somewhat nutritious before they load them onto the school bus.

Luckily for sugar-hungry kids and sleep-deprived parents everywhere, Cookie Crisp is here to bridge the gap! With cookies for the kids and 12 vitamins and minerals to keep the parents happy, who can complain, right?

Since they’ve already succeeded in bringing miniature chocolate chip cookies into the cereal bowls of millions of kids everywhere, Cookie Crisp has seemingly set its sights on an entirely new confection to cereal-ize: birthday cake!

After unsealing the bag to appreciate the aroma of freshly-opened cereal, I have to say, this is one of the most delicious smelling cereals I’ve ever bought! It literally smells like an ice cream parlor, and it made me super excited to have a bowl of these crispy cake-flavored-cookies as my post-workout snack.

Limited Edition Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp Cereal 2

Weighing out a proper portion quickly quieted any excitement that I had, though. I’ve never really thought about it much before, but 26 grams of cereal is so small! It barely even fills my cereal bowls halfway. If you’re eating this as a meal, expect to double or triple the serving size, along with the nutrition facts.

Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp looks the same as regular Cookie Crisp, only it seems that it’s traded the usual chocolate bits on the cereal for a sprinkling of Fruity Pebbles dust instead.

Limited Edition Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp Cereal 3

I decided to eat a handful of them by themselves before I poured milk into the rest of my bowl, and any anticipation that I may have had left quickly dissipated. They don’t taste like birthday cake at all! The flavor of the corn completely overpowered everything else, and all I tasted was a generic cereal!

I mean, it’s not awful or anything, but it doesn’t taste different from anything else out there. Certainly not like the cookie-cake-cereal hybrid that I was promised. Eating the cereal with milk nuances the intensity of the corn flavor, but it still doesn’t bring out any cake flavor.

If I hadn’t seen the box before eating this, I would just tell you I was eating regular cereal puffs or something. In brief, this is one limited edition item that’s not worth your trouble to seek out.

Limited Edition Birthday Cake Cookie Crisp Cereal 4

It does work to make some pretty good miniature ice cream sandwiches with, though. Just sayin’.

(Nutrition Facts – 3/4 cup without milk – 100 calories, 10 calories from fat, 1 gram of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 110 milligrams of sodium, 22 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 9 grams of sugar, and 1 gram of protein.)

Purchased Price: $3.98
Size: 19.8 oz. box
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Smells delicious! Decent cereal in its own right. Holds up well in milk.
Cons: Doesn’t remind me of either birthday cake or cookies. Most generic-tasting cereal ever.

REVIEW: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds Cereal

Denis 6 Comments

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds Cereal

I do not like Brussels sprouts. I would not eat them here or there. I would not eat them in a truck. I would not eat them with a duck…-billed platypus.

Am I trying to go all Dr. Seuss on you? I could not, would not. But would I eat Brussels sprouts with cinnamon sugar?

Those are foods (assuming cinnamon sugar counts as a food) that I figured were on opposite ends of the tastiness spectrum. What would cinnamon sugar blasted on Brussels sprouts taste like? Since I’m uncertain where the produce section is at my local store (or what Brussels sprouts look like), I’ll leave that question up to you. As a close substitute, I can tell you what the new Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds taste like.

It was with some trepidation that I picked these up, because I put Cinnamon Toast Crunch (CTC) on the Mount Rushmore of breakfast cereals, while Shredded Wheat would go somewhere in the bowels of hell.

I remember when Cinnamon Toast Crunch came out in the 1980s, during a glorious era of sugar cereals when manufacturers didn’t even try to hide how much of the magic white crystals were in them. Just about every cereal had the word “sugar” in it, and if that wasn’t enough, there was even one called Super Sugar Crisp. Sadly, many cereals now trumpet how they have whole grains, help lower cholesterol, and other such nonsense.

So can a cereal that brings together two extremes taste good? Actually, yeah. Obviously, CTC Blasted Shreds are not as good as the original CTC, but it’s still a tasty cereal with a bonus feeling of eating something that is not completely bad for you.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds Cereal 2

Upon opening the box, the Shreds did not really have that trademark CTC smell, and they are smaller than I envisioned after seeing an oversized example on the front panel. Even though they’re small, my box contained a good number of conjoined twins that looked more like the larger Shredded Wheat I remember.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds Cereal 3

I’m just as likely to eat cereal straight from the box as I am with milk, and these Shreds proved to be quite good sans cow juice. They didn’t seem as heavy or dense as I thought they’d be, and the flavor faithfully replicated the original Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal while the Shredded Wheat did nothing to detract from that.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds Cereal 4

Once you dip them in a milk bath, things get even better. The Shredded Wheat did an admirable job of keeping the milk from making the cereal too soggy while allowing some milk in, resulting in a nice crunch with a hint of softness. The overall texture of the cereal is not as rough as you might expect from Shredded Wheat either, and it still packs a potent sugar punch.

While these don’t quite match the original CTC, they do hit the sweet spot by balancing a tasty sugary cereal with healthy whole grain wheat.

(Nutrition Facts – 2/3 cup – 230 calories, 40 calories from fat, 4.5 grams of fat, 1.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 5 milligrams of sodium, 160 milligrams of potassium, 44 grams of carbohydrates, 7 grams of fiber, 13 grams of sugar, and 4 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $2.98
Size: 23.2 oz. box
Purchased at: H-E-B
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Much more fiber and protein than regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Tastes good with or without milk. Allows you to brag to others about eating a healthy breakfast of Shredded Wheat (feel free to omit the cinnamon and sugar blast part).
Cons: Not as good as regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Doesn’t have the added vitamins and minerals that are typically blasted onto breakfast cereals, which is ironic given the name.

REVIEW: Kellogg’s Super Mario Cereal

James 7 Comments

Kellogg s Super Mario Cereal

Released last December, finding Kellogg’s newfangled Super Mario Cereal hasn’t been easy. Long story short, each package has some sort of QR-Code type thingy on it, and if you scan it with your Nintendo controller it unlocks some kind of new in-game content. Naturally, this has led to collectors/hoarders snatching up the product in droves, with online merchants reselling the cereal on eBay at triple, quintuple, and even 100 times the MRSP.

While strolling through the aisles of Walmart on a recent mechanical pencil and instant coffee run, I stumbled across a freshly stocked pyramid of the ultra-rare breakfast foodstuff. And while I was tempted to buy about 20 of them, hold on to them for 25 years and resell them at $200 a pop, I decided to be a good little consumer and only scoop up one. Hopefully, the karma will lead to the re-release of Dunkaroos, or mayhap even the resurrection of the Bell Beefer, in due time.

Kellogg s Super Mario Cereal 2

Aesthetically, the packaging is pretty pleasing. There are a lot of Easter eggs and in-jokes on the front box, so hardcore Nintendo fans will get a kick out of that. The activity panel on the back, though, is way too rudimentary. Even for a children’s breakfast item, the trivia questions on this one are far too easy. And of course, you have that little QR-Code scanny thing. I’m not sure what it does, precisely, but I’m sure your eight-year-old nephew can fill you in on the details.

Kellogg s Super Mario Cereal 3

As for the cereal itself, well, it’s pretty mundane. It’s marketed as having a berry flavor, but it doesn’t explicitly tell you what kind of berry. So as soon as you crack open the box, you’re greeted by this weird, artificially fruity scent that’s one part strawberry, one part blueberry, and one part scented unicorn sticker.

Kellogg s Super Mario Cereal 5

The puffy rice stars are decent looking, but the taste is quite bland – they absorb all of that pseudo-berry chemical flavoring and wind up tasting like Franken Berry and Boo Berry’s illegitimate love child. And maybe it’s just me, but I SWORE there was a mild (yet strangely convincing) bacon-ish undercurrent to each piece. Please, somebody out there back me up on this, for my own sanity.

Kellogg s Super Mario Cereal 4

The marshmallows, though, are the most disappointing thing about the cereal. Not only do they taste alike (which are like the regular cereal bits, except slightly chewier), they don’t even remotely resemble the classical Super Mario insignia they’re supposed to represent. The 1-up mushrooms are kinda decent, but the mystery blocks and Super Mario hats are just abominations.

Outside of the Mario branding, this is a really generic cereal that reminded me a lot of the Avengers: Age of Ultron cereal Kellogg’s released three years ago. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the exact same formula, albeit with slightly tweaked marshmallow shapes.

Sorry, Mario. You might still be super, but your tie-in cereal here is merely average.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 cup – 120 calories, 10 calories from fat, 1 gram of total fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 grams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 55 milligrams of potassium, 27 grams of total carbohydrates, 3 grams of fiber, 10 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $2.99
Size: 8.4 oz. box
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: The packaging has a lot of neat nods and winks to the video games. The 1-up mushrooms are pretty nice. The cereal itself may or may not be secretly bacon-flavored.
Cons: The artificial berry flavoring is ho-hum. The puffed rice pieces are uninspired. A disappointing lack of marshmallow pieces shaped like Tanooki suits, King Boos, or Thwomps

REVIEW: Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal

Marvo 10 Comments

Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal

If you think Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal is some kind of epic Marvel/DC-like crossover between General Mills and Kellogg’s, hold your horseshoes, hearts, stars, clovers, blue moons, rainbows, and balloons.

With its blue box, “FROSTED FLAKES” in all caps lettering, and Lucky the Leprechaun sliding down a rainbow, it appears as if the two companies put down their spoons and bowls to come together. But that’s not the case and I imagine pigs will fly, hell will freeze over, and all cockroaches on Earth will die before that ever happens.

Instead, Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal looks as if Lucky Charms’ marshmallows have been paired with some generic version of Frosted Flakes with a name like Frosty Flakes, Frosting Flakes, Flakes with Frosting, Frosting Coated Flakes, Flakes Frosted, Frosted Corn Flakes, Corn Flakes with Frosting, Frosting Coated Corn Flakes, Corn Flakes Frosted, and I Can’t Believe It’s Corn Flakes with Frosting.

The flakes in this cereal have a different shape, are smaller, less frosted, and less sweet, making them not as good as Kellogg’s version. But the generic-looking frosted corn flakes are sweeter, crunchier, and all-around better tasting than the oat cereal pieces in regular Lucky Charms.

Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal 2

Now, I’ve said on numerous occasions that Lucky Charms is a favorite. But Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes has made me question that. The new cereal is crunchier, more sweet tooth-satisfying, and it’s helped me realize the magic in Lucky Charms is the ability to make us eat mediocre lightly sweetened oat cereal we would never eat without marshmallows.

Let me put it this way, after experiencing Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes, I wouldn’t buy a box of only Lucky Charms’ oat cereal unless I desperately needed horse feed. But I would buy a box of these generic frosted flakes. They improve the classic cereal and seem to stay crunchy longer in milk than the oat pieces.

But, even though I feel this cereal is better, it’s also kind of a letdown. If there was no such thing as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, which, again, is superior, this might’ve been gr-r-reater than gr-r-reat. But since Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes does exist because we aren’t living in Cereal Earth Dimension Y, I know this could’ve been even better.

Some of you might be saying, “Well then, there’s Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows.” That’s true, but, unfortunately, that suffers from being the opposite of this cereal. Frosted Flakes are great, but the marshmallows are mediocre. Some may say sugar is sugar, but Lucky Charms’ marbits are better for whatever reason. #magic?

Overall, if General Mills decided to do something drastic and make Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes Cereal THE regular Lucky Charms, I’d be all for it.

(Nutrition Facts – 3/4 cup without milk – 120 calories, 5 calories from fat, 0.5 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 55 milligrams of potassium, 27 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 10 grams of sugar, 15 grams of other carbohydrates, and 1 gram of protein.)

Purchased Price: $4.57
Size: 20.9 oz. box
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Better tasting, sweeter, and crunchier than regular Lucky Charms. Corn flakes seem to maintain their crunchiness better than the oat pieces.
Cons: Not a collaboration between Kellogg’s and General Mills. Using Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes would’ve made this epic. Makes me question how good Lucky Charms is.