Category Archives: Reviews

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

Nov. ’17

Review: Kellogg’s Donut Shop Pink Donut Cereal

Every so often, a cereal appears that you didn’t know you needed in your life. That is, until you taste it and realize that a part of you—a small, quiet part chilling out near the gall bladder—has had its secret cravings fulfilled. Kellogg’s Pink Donut Cereal is one of those cereals.

Like Superman Cereal‘s Nilla Wafer-esque goodness or Chocolate Mini-Wheats‘ pangs of ice cream sandwich goodness, Pink Donut Cereal—one of two entries in Kellogg’s new Donut Shop cereal line (the other is chocolate)—fulfills a very specific and very nostalgic flavor niche. So before you go all hipster-vegan-doughnut-shop on me, turning your maple-bacon-ganache-primed nostrils up and saying, “Pshh, Kellogg’s just reused their Froot Loops shaped and called them doughnuts,” or, “Pink is not a flavor. She’s a wildly successful pop music artist whom I only enjoy ironically,” hear me out:

Kellogg’s Pink Donut Cereal is good, and it tastes like a very specific pink thing you already know and love. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 9 rating, kelloggs. 7 Comments

Nov. ’17

Review: belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits

Gingerbread can do things to a man. Powerful things.

Its pillowy cookie coziness can make him devour a whole plates worth of gingerbread men with all the empathy of a bloodthirsty Xenomorph.
Its darkling molasses sweetness can make him suckle a used cookie cutter like a hungry baby’s favorite pacifier.
Its intricate blend of holiday spices can make him seriously grill a Home Depot employee for a price quote on building an actual gingerbread villa in the countryside—or at least a gingerbread armoire to hold all his Shrek DVDs.

Worst of all, gingerbread can make that cereal blogger scour the aisles of his local supermarket for any kind of gingery breakfast product—be it a cereal, oatmeal, or granola bar—he can write about. Even a breakfast biscuit—the kind that he, after triumphantly trafficking it like a footballer through the store’s pre-Thanksgiving, stuffing-clutching crowd, now munches on—would suffice.

So here he sits a-munching, transfixed by gingerfever. Is this him speaking to you, or the gingerbread? He thinks you should bow to your new gingerbread ov—

Oh hey guys, didn’t see you come in. That was weird—I just had a quick power nap, and now there’s an open package of belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits in front of me. Oh well, might as well give ’em a try, right? Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 5 rating, gingerbread, holiday, non cereal. 1 Comment

Nov. ’17

Review: Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs Cereal

Some things just make sense together. Like peanut butter and chocolate. Or peanut butter and jelly. Or peanut butter and bananas. Or peanut butter and analogies about things that go well together.

Oh, and chocolate and marshmallows, I guess.

That’s why it makes no sense that it took ’til 2017 for General Mills to realize just how many cents they’d make by putting mini marshmallows in Cocoa Puffs. From the humble Mallo Cup to being 2/3 of the iconic s’more, chocolate and marshmallows have a long history of delightfully gumming up people’s teeth.

But hot cocoa/hot chocolate (I refuse to take a stance on which name is better. As I’ve said before, I’m staying as neutral as a packet of Swiss Miss) is perhaps the most memorably cozy pairing of the two. Therefore, the only explanation for why this took so long is that Sonny always flies south for the winter. I’m willing to forgive him for going AWOL for Cocoa Puffs, so long as his redundantly named Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs are good. Since my childhood self used to think hot cocoa was made by microwaving chocolate milk, the bar is pretty low.

I still have nightmares about tepid, radiated and pasteurized dairy products.

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, chocolate, cocoa puffs, general mills, holiday. 2 Comments

Nov. ’17

Review: Mystery Oreo Cookies

I’m gonna cut right to the chase, because I don’t have a lot of time and the Oreo I’m dunking in milk with my left-hand while typing this with my right-hand like a clambering hen is quickly growing soggy:

The real mystery behind Mystery Oreo cookies is how Nabisco couldn’t come up with something more creative.

Yes, when it comes to the near-constant stream of new Oreo news—which flickers across my social media timeline reliably enough to warrant it its own stock exchange style ticker—I usually remain an enthusiastic spectator, rather than a loyal hunter and gatherer: after all, how am I supposed to afford 16 Hot-Choco-Doughnut-Bun-Shortcake Oreos with Crackling Candy Filling when I have 17 more boxes of Chocolate Peanut Butter Cheerios to buy, just to get me through the week?

The only time I take Oreo news seriously is when it involves a cereal flavor or the potential revival of Oreo Cakesters. And soon after Nabisco launched its Mystery Oreos, a nebulous flavor whose taste palate can be hypothesized for a chance to win $50,000, I heard from several little birdies that this flavor would “pique my personal interest,” *wink wink* *nudge nudge* *it’s a cereal flavor it’s a cereal flavor.*

So after donning a Holmes-ian hat, boning up on some Encylcopedia Brown, and assuring myself there’s no way Nabisco would release Oreo Cakester-flavored Oreo Cookies, I bought a package. Now, let’s solve a mystery the rest of the Internet solved three weeks ago!

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 4 rating, fruit loops, non cereal, pebbles. 1 Comment

Nov. ’17

Holiday Review: Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms Cereal

Halloween: over.
Jack-O-Lanterns: Decomp-O-sed.
Skeletons: stuffed back inside their human shells, where they belong.

Yes, now that October’s climactic ‘ween has waned, I’m slowly waxing into full Christmas mode (it’s easy to wax when you have so much 50% off candy corn left over). I know what you all you turkeys are thinking: but what about Thanksgiving? And I say to you two things. One, since Thanksgiving is objectively the chillest holiday, I don’t think it would give a rat’s mashed potato if we used it as a one-day, turkey-steeped nap in the middle of two months’ worth of Christmas mania.

And two: you show me a Thanksgiving cereal I can write about instead, and I’ll gladly dive headfirst into that bowl of Green Bean Casserole Toast Crunch.

So yes, I’m starting the holidays early with my review of Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms, one of two new wintery treats from General Mills. As for Thanksgiving, I’ll just leave out some stuffing and a glass of cranberry sauce for Tryptophanta Claus. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, general mills, holiday, lucky charms. 2 Comments

Nov. ’17

Review: Limited Edition Banana Nut Cheerios Cereal (2017)

The only thing I love more than bread is bread that lets me pretend I’m eating healthy.

That’s why banana bread and zucchini bread were the butten-laden cornerstones of my developmental years’ food pyramid. That’s why I’ve preserved my grandma’s mathematically perfected zucchini bread recipe into adulthood. And that’s probably why my gut is steadily taking the shape of a banana bread loaf, protruding through my shirt like T-1000 through a wall.

Even though a zucchini bread cereal is as likely as North Korea letting pigs into their no-fly zone, I’m ecstatic that we’ve seen a recent resurgence of banana bread cereals. First we got Canada’s Banana Bread Shreddies, and now fan-favorite Banana Nut Cheerios are back from whatever Davy Jones’ Pantry General Mills condemned them to for the past year or two.

And yes, I know it’s called Banana Nut Cheerios and not Banana Bread, but we all know that’s “banana nut” is a term invented by Big Bread to keep even the carb-conscious in the palm of their crust-caressing hands. But enough conspiracy: let’s slice, peel, and crack open a box! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 9 rating, banana, cheerios, general mills. 9 Comments

Oct. ’17

Review: Boo Berry Monster Cereal (2017)

And the 2017 “Most Improved Monster” award goes to…Boo Berry!

Yes, it’s true, everyone’s favorite indigo apparition has stepped up his game this year—in my past two years of Boo Berry reviews, his dubiously ambiguous and ambiguously dubious “fruit flavor” has lived in Count Chocula and Franken Berry‘s shadows. Ironic, for someone who’s essentially an anthropomorphized blue shadow.

But before we give Boo his third annual taste test, I have an important announcement: Happy Halloween! May your night be full of macabre merriment and no fewer than 8 fun-sized Snickers—and by “fun-sized” I mean “king-sized” because that’s where the real fun is.

Closing out this monster cereal review trilogy feels like a fitting way to celebrate—that’s why I originally wrote this review by stupidly replacing every instance of the “oo” vowel sound with “boo,” but switched back because it was unreadable.

Okay fine, I didn’t actually do this—but self-deprecation is the key to successful blogging, and man I sure am dumb! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, blueberry, boo berry, general mills, halloween. 2 Comments