Nature Valley is on a hot streak. With the delicious Chocolate Oat Clusters and Baked Oat Bites already under their granola-crumb encrusted belt, will Nature Valley be able to bowl a turkey, score a hat trick, and direct a fitting end to their trilogy of new 2016 cereals?
This box of Honey Oat Clusters holds the answer to that question. When I saw all three new Nature Valley Cereals, this one looked like the boring runt of the litter.
“It’s just a bootleg Honey Bunches of Oats,” said the youthful and ignorant Dan of two months ago. But after eating my first crunchy spoonful of this cereal, one thing has been made abundantly clear:
This ain’t your grandma’s Honey Bunches of Oats!
Rather than having light, fragile, and blandly corny flakes, Honey Oat Clusters has a mix of super dense corn flakes and rugged wheat flakes. Seriously, I was worried I’d get a noise pollution ticket for “disturbing the public with deafening munches.”
The flavor of the flakes is a bit inconsistent, though. Some bites will be pure milled corn and wheat, making me feel like a barnyard animal. Other bites, however, will have a pleasant, syrupy honey kiss, making me feel like I just had a sloppy make out session with a queen bee.
The clusters, on the other hand, are uniformly delicious. And massive, too: aside from a few rare David-sized bits, all I encountered were Goliath mounds of granola that crumbled in my mouth.
The flavor of these honey-soaked puppies reminded me of a warm, baked honey graham cracker, with occasional notes of sweet and light honey frosting. This, too is different than Honey Bunches’ bunches, which have the earthy, complex, and authentic honey flavor you’d get from a sloppy make out session with Winnie the Pooh.
If these awful metaphors get me in trouble with the law, please tell my family and friends I got arrested for something cooler. Hippopotamus joyriding or something.
I don’t know whether it’s the yeasty notes or the cake icing-like honey, but when eaten as a whole bowl, Honey Oat Clusters gives me a serious doughnut vibe: imagine a crunchy honey cruller. Since I also compared Baked Oat Bites to doughnuts, I’m convinced that Nature Valley’s factory is haunted by the ghost of Dunkin’ Donuts Cereal.
Or maybe they just had a sloppy make out session with a Krispy Kreme.
The glorious addition of milk makes these crullers evolve into lightly honey glazed, vanilla cream-stuffed doughnut holes.
So despite some of its occasionally boring taste notes, overall Honey Oat Clusters is a worthy addition to Nature Valley’s 2016 line. With one season of cereal successfully finished, I can only hope they come out with three more. The pastry lover in me is hoping for peanut butter, cinnamon raisin, or maple varieties.
This also means that all the other Valleys of the world need to step their game up. C’mon, Hidden Valley: why haven’t we seen a Ranch Dressing Cereal yet?
The Bowl: Nature Valley Honey Oat Clusters
The Breakdown: Flakes are occasionally boring and mealy, but even the thought of chicken feed can’t take away from the awesomeness of “milky honey crullers.”
The Bottom Line: 8.5 embarrassing doughnut French kisses out of 10
(Basic Nutrition Facts: 230 calories, 13 grams of sugar, and 8 grams of protein per 1 cup serving)