Category Archives: Specials

News: Monster Crunch! Card Game Reanimates Frute Brute & Yummy Mummy

(Photo via Board Game Geek)

(Photo via Board Game Geek)

I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic, but this might be the best thing to happen to cereal gaming since that time I beat Chex Quest 3 in one sitting with only a bag of Doritos (Nacho Cheese over Cool Ranch, to set the tone) as my copilot.

Monster Cereal—the annually/autumnally recurring trio of Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry Cereals—news usually leaks early, about August or so, so it’s only fitting that a teaser for this year’s Halloween M.C.s would hit a month earlier.

The news came courtesy of Board Game Freak, with Dinosaur Dracula helping broadcast.

While the very existence of a physical cereal card game has my credit card feeling warm, Monster Crunch!, dubbed “The Breakfast Battle Game” becomes infinitely more desirable for its resurrection of cherry-flavored Frute Brute and orange née vanilla Yummy Mummy. Observing this situation critically, I think there’s a 50:50 chance this was either done because the pair are coming back in cereal form this year, and the card game designs will match their box art, or because General Mills is historically cool with throwing the canine–Egyptian duo pity references but no cereals, a post-’80s revival that only happened once, in 2013.

You never know with General Mills, so I would pick a safer Halloween Cereal to place bets on. Like whether or not pumpkin spice will steal another spot from pecan pie.

(Photo via Board Game Geek)

(Photo via Board Game Geek)

But what we do know is a brief overview of the gameplay:

It’s ok to play with your food! Pick your favorite Monster Cereal character and battle to see who can “eat” the most cereal.

In this fast-paced game of luck and strategy, players collect as many Cereal Cards in their Bowls as they can. Each Monster has special powers to give you an advantage and help you gobble up the most cereal. Use Milk Tokens to combine Cereal Cards and take bigger bites. The Monster Cereal character that munches the most wins the game!

Monster Crunch! The Breakfast Battle Game features Boo Berry, Count Chocula, Fruit Brute, Fruity Yummy Mummy, and Franken Berry.

description from the publisher

Now that sounds a bit like Hungry Hungry Hippos glitched into a Mario Party Mini-Game, but they had me at “milk tokens,” which is now what I’ll call all currency. Unfortunately, the provided pictures don’t let us decipher what each monster’s special power is, but I think we can safely assume Boo Berry can throw his hat like Oddjob.

Look for more details about this cereal’s release soon. I call Yummy Mummy for the first game!

Cerealously Turns 3!

Baby Cerealously is 3 Months Old

I’m getting old.

3. That’s like, 29 in blog years. I’m not ready to be outgrowing trendy latte bars!

But I realize the hypothetical age of this blog is entropically ambiguous, as I equally praise both the sugary innocence of Lucky Charms and the hearty sensibility of Raisin Bran, so let’s just agree that 3 is probably too old to be making extensive fanfare. That’s why I won’t be doing a quantitative analysis of score distribution this year—in blog years, that was decades ago! Numbers are a young man’s game!

But I will still say thank you to everyone who continues to read this site, and greetings to those who recently stumbled upon it and decided to stick around. I hope you like Simpsons references and six-adjective sentences. I mean it when I say your support inspires me to keep writing/crunching/munching/spooning.

In celebration I made this tiny cereal treat. It’s made from Kellogg’s recently released Birthday Cake Rice Krispies (read the review and see my other birthday cake product reviews here), and it sure isn’t Gordon Ramsay, but it’s better than a Gordon Food Service dumpster.

Here’s the recipe for all you Pinteresters out there.

1) Fashion one (1) Kellogg’s Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treat into a roughly sprinkled pizza slice using a pizza cutter, knife, or spool of hot wire.

2) Feed the trimmin’s to your nearest Furby (or humans if you’re desperate).

3) Microwave a bundle (approximately two bunches of white chocolate chips (the chipperer the better: this is a birthday party!) for 64 seconds (give or take 32 seconds. you know how chocolate chips are).

4) Using a spool of hot wire (if you haven’t completed your hot wire certification, use a knife instead), spread the gooey white chocolate bog across the Rice Krispizza in a dolloped, classically Little Caesarian pattern.

5) Repeat Step 1, being sure to keep the A/C on (bogs bubble when warmed!).

6) Plant brick #2 on top brick #1.

7) Attempt and fail to PhotoShop out all the sticky bits.

Serve on marble and have a happy C3realously Day!

Spooned & Spotted: Cap’n Crunch with 3x Bigger Berries!

Cap'n Crunch XL With 3x Bigger Berries and Peanut Butter Pieces

Happy Independence Day, everyone! I hope you’re ready to celebrate independence from your pants size, or at least with this news of XXXL Crunch Berries, independence from unscathed palates.

This truly gasp-inducing (how else will you fit them in your mouth?) news, shared by @theghostinyoumusic on Instagram, didn’t actually take me totally by surprise. Those who remember reading about my leak of Captain Crunch’s Beach Bash will recall that I also under the trademark for Captain Crunch’s Mega Crunch.

I had no idea what it was at the time—truth be told I was hoping it was something a little cooler than giant Peanut Butter Crunch and Crunch Berries—but I guess this is more ergonomically consumed than the giant, meteoric cinder block of solid Crunch Berry I was imagining.

screenshot_20180704-1051093117404232545363713.png

As you can see from The Ghost in You’s other photo, these jumbo Berries truly are powerful orbs worthy of an RPG fetch quest. And alongside news that Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows is adding 50% more marshmallows, I think this is the most fitting pair of cereal news headlines that could come out of a holiday dedicated to eating enough hot dogs that you ralph just upstream of the family pool.

Happy 4th, y’all! Get an extra Cap’n Slurpee for me.

Spooned & Spotted: Buffalo Wild Wings Crunch Berries Blender

Seeing Cap’n Crunch, the modern patron saint of the inner child within us all, at a Buffalo Wild Wings may seem jarring, but in reality, it’s a pretty good bit of breakfast lore continuity. 

You see (you see how I started this sentence with “you” so I wouldn’t have two with “see” in a row?), the Cap’n has been picking up athletics again over the past couple years, returning to his position as the MVP of sugary-sporty cereals with Home Run CrunchTouch Down Crunch, and Soccer Crunch. So it only makes sense that eventually, he would sprain one or many parts of nautical old anatomy, and he’d instead retire from real sports and settle for a career in the game of kings:

Sitting at a Buffalo Wild Wings yelling at the TV with hot sauce on his pointing fingers. 

But the Cap’n isn’t content with just watching: he’s milking this deal out with a new milkshake. It’s called the Crunch Berries Blender, and it’s a non-alcoholic mix of whipped & ice creams + Crunch Berries cereal. Spotted by my own dear sister on Snapchat (hence the obfuscatory punctuation), this merry mix should be out at Buffalo Wild Wings locations already. Here’s the full recipe:

Guess I’ll have to bust out my dusty old “feigned interest in sports” from the basement to try it. I bet it still fits, too!

Spooned & Spotted: Rice Krispies with Spring Colors

Spring Rice Krispies Cereal

Look, I know weather is bad every where, but I think any of my fellow Midwesterners can agree that these past two months of “spring” have been a bigger tease than my school bullies after I admitted I liked Neopets.

So while Michigan’s climate has been clenching my seasonally affected spirits in its mittened clutches, I think we’re finally over the worst of it. While I happily sweated through my local Meijer, I appropriately saw a beacon of true Spring: like a prancing baby deer, chirping robin, or one of those awful stink trees—you know, the ones that smell like a damp Filet-O-Fish that got kicked under a rotten couch—a seasonal cereal like these new Spring colored Rice Krispies are harbingers of happy times, times when I don’t need to sleep inside a Tauntaun to feel comfortable.

While new to the States, these blue and green Rice Krispies have been released in Canada before. And while I’m not sure exactly what its colors are trying to connote—robin’s eggs in a tree? oceanic algae? the Blue Man Group on St. Patrick’s Day?—I do know one thing for sure: seeing newly animated Snap, Crackle, and Pop in bunny ears seems like a good prompt for a Silent Hill fan fiction.

Featuring my favorite OC of course: Food Pyramid Head.

Got a hot cereal tip of your own to share? Pass it over to our Submissions page and you could see your name and photo right here on the site!

News: Cap’n Crunch’s Beach Bash Crunch is Coming Soon (Plus Bonus Crunch Rumors!)

Cap'n Crunch's Beach Bash Crunch

Cap’n Crunch is the Mario of the cereal world.

Aside from the killer ‘stache and symbolic embodiment of an undying imaginative childhood, Horatio Magellan Crunch and Italy’s most esteemed septic specialist also share a knack for character versatility.

Where Mario has appeared in basketball games, parties, races, hotels, and even famous disappearances, the Cap’n has likewise found himself playing sports, slinging ice cream, and even infamously disappearing.

And now, until we get the Cap’n Crunch Kart video game the world deserves—power-ups will naturally include Soggies that turn the track squishy—ol’ H. M. Crunch is hitting the beach. Continue reading

Spooned & Spotted: Cap’n Crunch’s Soccer Crunch

(Photo via hollywooderik on eBay)

(Photo via hollywooderik on eBay)

Fill another World Cup of joe, and get ready to fill your World Bowl with tri-colored Crunchberries, because Cap’n Crunch’s Soccer Crunch, first seen in 2010, is alive and kicking again.

Spotted by Oreo Hunters on Instagram then uncovered in an eBay auction, 2018’s re-release of Soccer Crunch trades the original’s Cap’n Crunch with red and blue ‘Berries into a strictly faux-fruity affair.

Now that we’ve got our daily serving of imaginary fruit, can we get some Crunchbroccoli?

Cereal scholars will notice that these reskinned Crunchberries are even less original than they seem. It looks like the cereal pieces from Freedom Crunch, an unreleased concept cereal that hit only the selectest of select markets last summer, have found a new team in this sports-themed variant.

In short, the athletic modern Crunch trilogy of HomeRun and TouchDown Crunch is now complete, and I’ll have to find another creative way to review the same cereal I’ve eaten 100 times.

Now that’s a lofty GOOOOOOOAAAALLLL!

Spooned & Spotted (Canada): Classic Taste Honeycomb Cereal

Classic Honeycomb Taste - Bring Back Honeycomb Changed

Picture the end of Return of the Jedi, but instead of Ewoks and bonfires on Endor, it’s Ewoks and bonfires in the middle of a cereal aisle. And the grinning Force ghosts of Andre the Giant and your inner child are watching with approval.

Yes, friends: classic Honeycomb is back, and the Honeycomb Hideout belongs to the consumer once more.

Allow me to explain: last year, Post changed the ingredients of 50-year classic cereal Honeycomb to be all natural, branding it as having “BIGGER HONEY TASTE.” Seems pretty innocuous, right? I mean, Honey Nut Cheerios became gluten free without jeopardizing taste, right?

Cue the 300 comments and counting tell me I’m wrong. While I thought the new stuff wasn’t that bad, every person who grew up clutching a bowl of Honeycomb in Anytown, USA chimed in to bemoan the loss of, if you believe their stories, the very essence of their childhood, which was forcefully exorcised from them by faceless penny-pinching marketers. Perhaps my favorite elegy for the lost Honeycombs was this poetic take:

Screen Shot 2018-02-28 at 11.49.38 AM

I won’t downplay their sorrow. I know it means a lot to have something that has long meant a lot to you taken away, so I tried my best to encourage commenters to take action and tell Post, instead of me. And in an optimistic case study of the value of voting with your dollar, they listened.

As seen in this photo shared by Junk Food Jeff, Canadian stores are already stocking two Honeycomb options: the new, “Bigger Taste,” and an even newer, but also older, “Classic Taste” Honeycomb. And fear not, Harold Comb, age 58 from Tuscaloosa: Post has stated that Classic Honeycomb will be coming the the U.S. soon, too!

I’m so happy I could French kiss a bumblebee.

Thanks again to Junk Food Jeff for the pic. If you have some exciting cereal news of your own to share, check out our Submissions page!