Regardless, I’m rankled as a wrinkled raisin over the fact that I’ll likely never get to try Sainsbury’s new U.K.-exclusive Mince Pie Wheats Cereal. I mean, shredded wheat pockets filled with spiced raisins, cinnamon & nutmeg? Frosted Mini-Wheats could never. And yes, for those like me who were unaware, the “mincemeat” in mince pies is in fact, not meat, but a sweet treat that’s fun to eat. Or so I’d imagine—I haven’t tried a real mince pie, either. But according to early overseas reviews, Mince Pie Wheats do their namesake justice:
“It’s good to be honest, I taste the raisin, cinnamon and nutmeg, and it does have that familiar mince pie flavour, but then the bitterness hits. Maybe they’ve tried to recreate those notes you get with boozy mince pies? The next morning I have the cereal for breakfast. When you add milk it diminishes the bitterness – you can still taste it, but not offensively, and once I get over the fact I’m eating mince pie cereal, I realise I’m very much enjoying these wheaties. Before I know it, the bowl is empty and I’m happily full. See you tomorrow, mince pie wheats. Love, your newest convert xox.” —Huffington Post U.K.
Have you tried Mince Pie Wheats? Sound off in the comments below if you think it’d be worth the effort for me to track it down.
The year is 20TC: I listen to the satisfying crunch as I click with my dusty Cinnamouse to publish a new Cinneriously.net blog post about Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s latest cinnamon sugar lifestyle cinnfusion: Cinnalink, a brain chip that immediately (and constantly) triggers the neural enjoyment of eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, all without lifting a spoon! It’s the taste you no longer need to see—though you can recreate the experience with the brand’s accompanying Cinnavision Goggles.
Yes, with over 1,000 different uses for the Cinnamon Toast Crunch essence they’ve extracted from each crazy square’s mortal soul, General Mills is just a few Cinnamon Toast Seraphims away from opening up a holy portal to the Cinnaverse’s sweet, sweet paradise. And we’re all invited over for eternal breakfast!
But that’s in the future. Right now, Cinnamon Toast Crunch has only begun its quest to literally milk the cereal’s cult status dry with peripheral products that, though ostensibly only flavored with cinnamon and sugar, still carry name brand markup. It’s especially fitting that this latest piece of Toast Crunch news, Nestle’s Cinnamilk, came out the same day I finally acquired CTC Cinnadust:
I consider this poetic because, as Nestle also makes Nesquik, I could now either a) simply drink Cinnamilk, b) mix Cinnadust and regular milk, Nesquik style, or c) mix Cinnadust and Cinnamilk to clip out of reality and into the Cinnaverse—years before General Mills’ plan to do the same. That said, there’s also the traditionalist’s option d), to eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and drink the milk left behind, but who would want to do something so antiquated? It’s 2020, Grandpa: we ingest cereal in other forms of matter now. Now hook me up to my CinnamO₂n tank.
Now that I’ve spent this entire blog post wasting your time by Cinnamon Toast Chuckling at my own jokes, I’ll leave you with the one fact you probably came here for:
14oz bottles of Cinnamilk will hit mass retailers in January.
No, no: this is all wrong! How can a Sesame Street cereal with a name like “123 Berry” be fronted by any Muppet other than Count von Count? What did you do with him, General Mills? Did you sign a vampiric exclusivity deal with Count Chocula, pushing the purple felted numerologist out of the picture with the mythological punishment of counting to infinity?
Or, since this 123 Berry cereal box is just a sales sample and not final, is the Count still in hair & makeup?
Whatever the reason, von Count’s absence isn’t the only troubling thing about Sesame Street 123 Berry cereal, first shared by consistent General Mills leaker Cereal Life. Namely, the very fact that this is another berry-flavored cereal out of the endless fruit pi of similar licensed releases doesn’t leave me with much hope that the taste will be exciting. Granted, it is billed as a wholegrain, rather than a corn cereal, but since previous Sesame Street cereals ended up as forgotten relics of Alpha-Bits past, 123 Berry will have to do a lot to escape the sins of its ancestors.
So good luck, Elmo & Co.: the world’s fledgling mathematicians are counting on you.
Shhh!! Do not move. Do not say a word. Quietly read the words I’m about to present you: he’s in the room with you, right now. But he can’t see you if you remain still and silent, like Christmas Eve’s unstirred mouse.
The Elf on the Shelf feeds on fear. An animistic Yuletide talisman capable of movement speeds greater than SCP-173 when not in view, this guy was clearly deemed too dangerous for Santa’s workshop and sent to a maximum-security Antarctic prison, where he easily slipped past inattentive penguin guards to asexually multiply across shelves worldwide.
Okay fine, a lot of people love the Elf on the Shelf. I think he’s creepy. And that’s why he finds me delicious.
I’ll admit, when Kellogg’s first released Elf on the Shelf Sugar Cookie Cereal last year, I didn’t expect it to return for 2020—let alone with offspring. For while Elf on the Shelf Sugar Cookie Cereal is just alright, it’s no Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch and never will be.
However it’s sequel flavor sounds a bit more permafrost-breaking. As the first mint cereal without chocolate, Elf on the Shelf Vanilla Candy Cane Cookie Cereal brings back those familiar crunchy stars but swap out the boring white pill marbits for cute peppermint swirl ones. Given 2020’s tepid track record with vanilla cereals, I’m hesitant to say whether EotS VCCCC will actually be good, but I’m giving it points for originality regardless.
Expect to see both Elf on the Shelf cereals on, well, store shelves starting this month.
That’s it, folks: I’m officially out of my element and not properly certified to dissect this news piece. It just feels like, after so many recentmutationswithin the Toast Crunch family—which is really more like a genus at this point—Toast Crunchology has become a discipline so complicated it requires a college degree to fully grasp the ecological, gastronomical, and heck, cosmological significance of Chocolate Churro Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Of course, the humorless reality is that this Chocolate Churro Toast Crunch is far from revolutionary. Just as regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros tasted nearly identical to their square relatives, so too will Chocolate Churro Cinnamon Toast Crunch most likely adapt Chocolate Toast Crunch in a more tubular, crunchy, and palate-lancing shape.
Despite its not-too-surprising existence—a convenient clap-back to Chocolatey Churro Pop-Tarts, perhaps?—Chocolate Churro Toast Crunch is probably going to be pretty good, because Chocolate Toast Crunch and Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros are also, well, pretty good. Congratulations, young Choco—Cinna Churros: you are the apples of both parents’ eyes.
December 2020: The Toast Crunch Dynasty’s Last Stand. As the snow piles around the old cathedral and the rabid Teddy Grahams—prematurely upset from their winter slumber—keep pouring through the crunched-open stained glass windows. What few Crazy Squares remain regret cannibalizing their Churro & French Toast comrades. They sharpen their sugar cookie shurikens and prepare to defend their cereal’s legacy. Cinnamon Toast Crunch? An irrelevant cereal? Over their soggy bodies.
I over-exaggerate, of course: Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of the most popular cereals ever, and such acclaim is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. But between Honey Maid Cinnamon Graham Crunch and Malt-O-Meal ChurrO’s, Post has proven how much better Cinnamon Toast Crunch could be if it really applied itself. Despite this, Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch as of yet has no equal, let alone a superior. For the time being, the annual return of Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch is worth celebrating.
The stuff isn’t all that flavorfully complicated—it’s doughy and buttery, yet still lightly cinnamon’d and heavily sugared. According to General Mills, SCTC is already shipping to stores, so once you get over the cross-temporal discomfort of seeing holiday cereals next to Halloween ones, I encourage you to pick up enough boxes to catapult from a second-story window at trick-or-treaters. Continue reading →
Six months. Cereal makers have had six months of quarantine to hunker down, cut through the corporate B.S. and dream up something legendary for the breakfast industry, yet I have to admit, their current efforts feel half-baked—and more than a little stale.
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who’s been rallying for retro reversion since he started writing about cereal, I don’t want to sound ungrateful. General Mills’ just-announced “Ultimate Taste Comeback” could be a harbinger of great things to come, but two truths stand out: one, the improved cereals appearing above seem like weak initial efforts, and two, the view of celebrating cereal’s nostalgia would’ve been really hot and timely five years ago. It is the opinion of this cereal scholar that cereal as a nostalgic symbol or vehicle was once so obvious of an idea that it’s become a bit clichéd. Now that The Empty Bowl has made such a splash in the field of breakfast meditation, I presently like to supplement any corporate-driven nostalgic retrovision with an eye for what the individual can constructively make out of their own cereal experience.
But I mindfully and mindlessly digress. Let’s assess General Mills’ Ultimate Taste Comeback lineup:
Trix will feature six fruity shapes again! Wait, wait…they’ve done exactly this for the past two years. So, not exactly a comeback as much as a box art refresh.
Cocoa Puffs will have “more chocolatey taste!” This is exactly the kind of vague promise that irks me about The Ultimate Taste Comeback—how are we supposed to know this is a dedicated throwback cereal if we’re given no proof that diligence was done to recreate vintage Cocoa Puffs?
Golden Grahams is bringing back honey as an ingredient. Between this only being an eight-year throwback and the stuff not really tasting much different, we already know that perhaps the most exciting announcement of these four Comeback cereals didn’t really have that much effort put into it, in terms of palpable change.
Finally, Cookie Crisp promises the same generic chocolatey infusion as Cocoa Puffs, albeit phrased more dramatically by Chip the Wolf. If I’m interpreting his kerning correctly, this Cookie Crisp will have “More Chocolate Chip C∞oookie Taste!” Definitely a bold promise—if this Cookie Crisp grants me anything less than eternal life in a state of divinely cookie’d nirvana, I’ll be disappointed.
Alongside these cereals, as part of their Ultimate Cereal Comeback, General Mills will host The Ultimate Saturday Morning Drive-In, with guest Mario Lopez streaming classic cartoons in California and online, October 3rd. If there were ever a place for General Mills to surprise debut retro Monster Cereals, it’d be there. Just be sure to keep six feet (or cars) away from Boo Berry. Who knows what his ethereal plasm might’ve picked up.
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.
