Whoa, whoa, easy there, stranger. You new around these parts? It looks like you’ve got some contraband on you: a worrisome burden weighing on your shoulders, and a bellyful of unaddressed anxieties. Here on The Empty Bowl’s Empty Beach of twinkling auburn cinnamon sugar sand, such negativity is not only discouraged, but actively remedied by the beach’s staff. So please, check all your emotional baggage and hoist it into the milky ocean. Where we’re going, you won’t need woes.
Welcome back to The Empty Bowl, a meditative cereal podcast hosted by me and Justin McElroy. In Episode Thirty-Eight, we continue exploring 2020’s bottomless cinnamon cereal selection, talk about an underrated cereal that crept up on us, and give a brief primer on the season’s best autumn cereals.
Still smuggling a few uncertainties in your back pocket? The calming cereal tides keep churning at our Anchor hub, where you can listen to Thirty-Seven and any other episodes. You can also follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but each one helps seize sadness from a clamoring beachgoer.
UPDATE: Shortly after posting this, Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal has been CONFIRMED for a December release by Kellogg’s! No word on Cosmic Brownies yet.
UPDATE 2: Kellogg’s has told me that Cosmic Brownies Cereal “is not launching at this time.” Whether this means it’s been scrapped entirely remains unclear.
Get out of my brain, Big Cereal! Good ideas don’t come ’round too often in this noggin of mine, so I can’t have you siphoning ’em off like a milk-blooded facehugger.
Okay fine, it doesn’t take a particularly ingenious synapse-firing to realize a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie Cereal would be a great idea, but given the number of times I’ve referenced the iconic snack cake on this breakfast-centric blog, I at least deserve fringe kudos for keeping the things prominent in our toothsome zeitgeist.
That said, this rumor is an interesting one—it starts with a YouTube video detailing not only a leaked Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal, but a Cosmic Brownies Cereal, too.
Now, there’s plenty to be skeptical about here. For one, finding evidence of any ongoing relationship between Little Debbie and Kellogg’s is difficult, beyond product recalls from a decade ago claiming Kellogg’s manufactured some snack cracker products for Little Debbie’s parent company McKee Foods. But if Post could cozy up with Hostess, it wouldn’t surprise me to see competitor Kellogg’s seize the chance to partner with the next largest snack cake company. At the same time, with no box art (or rainbow sprinkles!) for Cosmic Brownies Cereal, one could reasonably argue that the cereal pictured is just the similar-looking Cocoa Puffs Brownie Crunch.
But luckily, just this morning I got an inside scoop from a retail worker who saw the UPC for a Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies Cereal in their store’s product order catalogue. They were quick to note, though, that said catalogue also included listings for long-gone releases like Frute Brute and Yummy Mummy, so while all signs point to an imminent release of these two Little Debbie cereals, I can’t confirm them with 100% certainty just yet.
Regardless, my hype is has reached the height of three-to-four dozen double-decker Oatmeal Creme Pies, so I’m going to be reciting silent prayers to goad these leaks into a realized retail birth—especially if the OCP Cereal debuts with a vengeful amount of oat flour. What do you think? Legit or no? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.
In a year that refuses to be read like a book, we’re getting at least one more sweet little twist of cereal-adjacent obscurity.
Starbucks—err, well only Barnes & Noble Café locations that serve Starbucks coffee—is unleashing a new cookie studded with Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares. But don’t expect a pure and chaste cereal milk & cookies experience: as one Redditor has mentioned, this cookie is a triple threat of oatmeal, cinnamon, and chocolate chip. Which, honestly, sounds a lot better. Just as Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Cereal is basically Toast Crunch with a beefed-up base grain, so too does this cookie sound like Chocolate Toast Crunch if it were made with oat flour.
If you’ve tried this cookie, let me know what you think of it in the comments below. Personally, I’m swearing off Barnes & Noble until the disrespected ghost of Borders Books & Music tells me it’s okay.
Example: in the 200,000ish-person city where I live, despite dozens of renowned restaurants and artisan makers, perhaps my favorite menu item is a modest egg & cheddar on ciabatta sandwich. The ability to do so much with so few ingredients never fails to blow me away and make me scramble back for more. I mean, have you seen most sandwiches these days? Their menu descriptions are borderline biblical, with so much stuff stuffed within that it’s as hard to taste anything in particular as it is to eat the thing without it prolapsing prosciutto and quarts of aioli all over your hands.
But I digress. And wipe my fingers off.
I’ll admit, when it was first announced, Smartfood’s new Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries popcorn mix turned me off with its very concept. Sharp hulls and serrated Crunch Berries teaming up to shred my palate? My dental insurance is expensive enough. But now that I’ve actually got a chance to try the stuff, I’m happy to say that I was wrong, and Cap’n Crunch is a master of minimalistic munchies. Continue reading →
This is going to be a tough review to write. Not because Cookies & Creme Krispies are so rich with nuance that their abstract appeal defies conventional language. More like the opposite: this cereal is such a big yawn that my writerly brain is distracted, grappling with daydreams of better cereals. Or any cereal, for that matter.
It’s no secret that I’m biased against Krispies, Pebbles, and any other cereal that lacks a certain stomach-smacking density. But for the sake of this review, I will say that Cocoa Krispies & Pebbles are growing on me as indulgent late-night bowls of sopping milked chocolate. Continue reading →
As the world keeps turning, burning, yearning, spurning, and churning, a little Churro-ning goes a long way.
In a clear revival of their long-lost Mini Cinnamon Churros Cereal, which disappeared from shelves around 2013, Post and its cereal subsidiary Malt-O-Meal are bringing the tubular treat back to shelves with Churr-O’s Cereal, a decidedly more rounded take on churros.
Though they’ve always been a beloved dessert, churros are having a renaissance of sorts in the breakfast aisle. Between General Mills’ Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros, Chocolatey Churro Pop-Tarts and Kellogg’s of Mexico’s Panaderia Churros Cereal, there’s never been a better time to eat cinnamon cylinders in the morning.
Though these have already been spotted at Walmart, you can keep your eyes peeled for Churr-O’s Cereal near you with Malt-O-Meal’s product locator.
There are a lot of tough jobs in this world: oil rig worker, skyscraper window washer, lumberjack. But if we’re talking about a real David vs. Goliath battle of wits and resources, being an indie cereal maker is a profession where you have to overcome a lot of lopsided odds. Trying to market a new breakfast product against multi-billion dollar corporate behemoths like General Mills or Kellogg’s means accepting that your product will have to cost more and work harder without decades of brand recognition and cheap, bulk ingredients.
This is naturally why many independent cereal companies target their own niche of cereal consumers. Since the world’s cereal giants usually lack truly wholesome releases for those eating low carb, high protein, gluten-free or organic diets, we’ve seen any number of specialty or boutique breakfast startups offering cereals that are theoretically more healthy than any Special K or Kashi product.
From Magic Spoon and Cereal School to OffLimits and Three Wishes, there’s a lot of growing competition in the specialty cereal game. So how do you tell them apart? Well, for me it all comes down to the base grain*, which I’ve asterisked because several of these use grain alternatives like tapioca flour or chicory root fiber. If you read my first review of Three Wishes Cereal, where I covered their three introductory flavors, I noted how they perform a lot better in the base grain camp.
Does their newest release measure up? Let’s find out in three (wishes), two (wishes), one (wish)… Continue reading →
Well, they finally did it. After years of exclusive sweepstakes and crass imitations, Lucky Charms is offering anyone the chance to buy a 6oz pouch of ALL MARSHMALLOWS.
First reported by Saturday Morning Nostalgia and spotted at both Food City and Walmart, Lucky Charms Just Magical Marshmallows feels like a product that should have naturally came out decades ago. Granted, five-pound bags of generic cereal marshmallows have been just a Google search away for years now, but there’s something climactic about finally being able to buy the premium, name brand stuff.
Now what exactly do you do with so many rainbow-hued sugar nuggets? Well that’s up to your imagination. Microwave them together into a s’more-ready puck. Bake them into cookies. Or just make a bowl of Uh-Oh! Lucky Charms with just a few oat pieces scattered about. The world is your purple horseshoe!
