“An upper crust choice.” — The American Pastry Society
“A new high for the genre.” — Popular Tarts Magazine
“Do this one justice with a Stainless Steel Wolf Gourmet WGTR124S 4-Slice model.” — Toast Fancy
I’m not gonna beat around the crumbly, biscuity bush here: new Frosted Chocolatey Churro Pop-Tarts are good. So good that you shouldn’t need to read my next few hundred words of assorted praise to just go out and buy a box. But nevertheless, I will do my due diligence and explain why this is the best new Pop-Tarts flavor in a long time. Continue reading →
Thins. Crisps. Lite Snacks. Husks. Narrowed, flattened, and otherwise vaguely “healthified” versions of popular junk food flavors go by many names, but they share one constant: they’re never better than the originals, though one could hardly expect them to. At best, they make the toothsome tastes they’ve inherited more lithe and mobile.
I’m not sure whether portion size or convenience was the primary genesis behind Pop-Tarts Crisps—or perhaps it was heritage?—but thus far, we’ve seen threeflavors of the little pastry planks hit shelves, each more okay-ish-er than the last. Now with Appletastic Pop-Tarts Crisps landing out of left field, Pop-Tarts has made the conspicuous decision to not only drop another fruity Crisps flavor, but to also make it one that’s no longer even part of the main Pop-Tart cast. While Pop-Tarts Bites have at least made noble efforts to expand the taste profile of its line’s spotlit flavors, I have to wonder whether these will be Appletastic enough to make up for not being S’Mores Pop-Tarts Crisps.
Whether it’s Blue Moon ice cream or a glass of cold water at 3:00 a.m., some things have flavors that defy conventional description. Adjectives hardly do them justice. And to me, this is a great thing. The best part of exploring eccentric foodstuffs is having a taste take the words out of your mouth and stuff appetizing abstractions in their place.
That’s not to say Caramel Apple Jacks are mind-bogglingly good—just that this review is about to be a real struggle because we’re dealing with some serious fourth-dimensional stuff right here.
It doesn’t help that even regular Apple Jacks have a complicated history of not including apple ingredients, then quietly adding them recently—even though the loops are still way cinnamon heavy. So muddling the mix even more with caramel, whose flavor is best described as “caramelized,” only makes my job harder.
Regardless, this is basically the first ever meaningful variant of Apple Jacks (save for Cinnamon Jacks) that didn’t just change the pieces’ shapes or color, so I have to try my darnedest to wrangle up a crew of strapping young sentences and hogtie this taste down. Continue reading →
Since the first Pop-Tart was piped full of sweet goo and flapped over like an Agatha Crispy book…since that first Pop-Tart thwapped out of the toaster with enough velocity to spook the family dog two feet into the air…and since the first celestially blessed starchild opened a Pop-Tart pouch to find three inside instead of two…I’ve been on this blog, prolonging the intro to an ice cream review like it’s an SAT essay to delay the inevitable post-lactose malaise of eating it.
And right on schedule, here I am: with a Good Humor Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart bar sitting lusterlessly on a plate before me. Clearly just palette swapping the Strawberry Shortcake bars that are perhaps Good Humor’s most iconic, these Pop-Tarts bars bring the other most beloved toaster pastry flavor into the chilled spotlight of the freezer aisle.
Alright, I’ve made peace with myself and my god, and am ready to plunge deep into dire dairy digestive disarray—yes, I use alliteration as a coping mechanism. Continue reading →
Have you ever eaten a bag of Chex Mix and thought—boy, I wonder which of these pieces would kick the most ass. Well wonder no more, because Fred Chexter of Chex Quest fame is back, and he’s brought a ragtag crew of starchy squadmates with him.
For fans of this blog, Chex Quest needs no introduction. I’ve already written multiplearticles on the game and how my childhood fondness for it set off a chain reaction culminating in my site’s immaculate conception from the Milky Way’s milkiest æther. If you need a quick refresher on how we got to this point, allow me to brief—I don’t want my current play session to get soggy.
In 1996, General Mills contracted a small game studio, Digital Café, to design a CD-ROM to be packaged in cereal boxes. Working on a tight timeframe, they ended up doing a full, family-friendly DOOM conversion about a snotty Flemoid alien invasion of a breakfast star system. The hero, Fred Chexter, uses Zorch technology to send the lil boogers back to their home dimension. Continue reading →
As much as I love cereal, it’s hardly a heartwarmer. On rainy days such as these, when the air is thick with mossy malaise and the rooftop drums in staccato spurts, a chilly lightning bolt of sugary milkiness straight to the gut isn’t as satisfying as a deep glug of hot coffee—the kind that blossoms in your belly like a rollicking rafflesia. Well, minus the corpse stench, of course.
I’ve long been a religious coffee drinker for such reasons of inner immolation, and while I’ve reviewed my fair share of cereal-flavored coffee creamers, never once could I even conceive that there’d be straight-up cereal-steeped coffee beans. That was until Empty Bowl listener Tasha tipped me off about Bones Coffee—a company known for outlandish small-batch coffee flavors like PB&J or Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream—and their Electric Unicorn blend. Not a new flavor but a recently reformulated one, Electric Unicorn coffee is said to be flavored like fruity cereal. As this is a nebulous bit of nomenclature that could refer to anything from Froot Loops to Raisin Bran (technically), I felt it was up to me to find out whether these beans live up to the brouhaha behind them. Continue reading →
Evolution is a slow process, one that’s unlikely for an individual to fully witness. That’s why it’s taken me so long to write about Banana Special K—this is a cereal brand that debuts new flavors in geological increments. With no fanfare and little variation in box design, trying to spot a new Special K is like trying to spot a new paint sample at Home Depot from three aisles over.
As an on-the-beat cereal blogger who lives in the milky moment—the ever-crunchy now—I could scarcely tell Banana Special K (which actually came out closer to January) from Vanilla & Almond.
But it’s better late than never, so I’ll try to make this quick—err, I mean Kwik. With a capital K. Continue reading →
When you get right down to the rock bottom of it, there are really only two types of Pop-Tarts people: People who like fruity Pop-Tarts and those who prefer Chocolate Pop-Tarts. Yes, there some Pop-Tarts that can’t be easily sorted onto this continuum, but with the exception of fan-flavor-ite Brown Sugar Cinnamon (which really should be considered a member of the extended “brown sweetness” family alongside Cousin Chocolate), I can’t think of any Pop-Tart flavors beyond the choco-fruit binary that have a significant fan following. Yes, this includes Confetti Cupcake. And no, this doesn’t and in fact can’t include The Chosen One.
It was supposed to bring balance, which is why Kellogg’s destroyed it.
Long story short, I’m a chocolate Pop-Tart kind of guy. Chocolate Chip is probably my favorite of the O.G.s, while Milk Chocolate Graham forever has my heart for evicting that freeloading marshmallow from S’Mores Pop-Tarts. Yeah, I said it.
This is why, though I love classic Strawberry Pop-Tarts, I don’t think the likes of Blueberry, Cherry, and Raspberry—the latter of which I can’t remember ever having eaten more than once or twice. When Kellogg’s first tried to re-skin Raspberry Pop-Tarts as Spidey Berry Pop-Tarts, I gave them a pass. But now that Spidey Berries have been mashed en masse to produce an ocean’s worth of SpongeBob’s Sea Berries, I figured it was fate telling me to give the flavor another shot—or else the next time they came back it’d be as Beetle Juicy Pop-Tarts. Continue reading →
