Review: Caramel Apple Jacks

New Caramel Apple Jacks Cereal Box

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

News (Canada): Tim Hortons Froot Loops Dream Donut

New Tim Hortons Froot Loops Dream Donut

Oh, I once had a dream about a donut, alright. It was the size of two Gateway Arches and had the auto-cannibalistic serpent’s head of a dough-roboros. The thing started spinning toward me like Sonic the Hedgehog, launching sprinkled shrapnel all across the Windows XP wallpaper I’d been having lunch on, and I only managed to flee by rolling down a rollicking green hill. The dream donut launched off the hill and into the sun, exploding into a yeasty meteor shower.

So yeah, Tim Hortons: any chance you could make that one?

For those who have been sleeping under a rock-hard stale cruller all year, Tim Hortons has been testing a number of experimental donut flavors in their Innovation Café and across Canada. And while the likes of Chocolate Truffle and Dulce de Leche have had some pretty crumby reviews, the latest flavor debuting in both whole-nut and Timbit form is sure to pique any cereal blog reader’s interest.

Tim Hortons Froot Loops Dream Donuts pair a pink-glazed and white-iced donut with a whole handful’s worth of Froot Loops pieces themselves—pieces that can be pummeled to smithereens and stuck to a Timbit, too. Unfortunately, if the comparatively natural colors of these foreign Froot Loops are any indication, FL Dream Donuts are likely to be Canada-exclusive for the foreseeable future. This means it’s also very unlikely that I’ll be able to do a full review of these baked treats, but other reviewers have already done the sticky work for us, if you want to know how the taste stacks up:

Personally, I’m hesitant about any cereal dessert that includes full-sized pieces, as they often end up tasting extremely stale. But if you live near a participating Canadian Tim Hortons, let me know whether these Froot Loops Donuts made your dreams come true—or if they chased you nightmarishly into the Hudson Bay.

Review: Good Humor Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Ice Cream Bars

Good Humor Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Ice Cream Bars Review Box

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

News: Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes + Froot Loops Mashups Cereal

Kellogg's Frosted Flakes & Froot Loops Mashups Cereal

Hey there kids, Kellogg’s here: we heard you like cereal! We even heard you like multiple cereals! Well sure, you could buy more than one cereal, but what if you bought one cereal that was two cereals? What’s that? You want an exciting two-in-one cereal that represents an iconic flavor combo like PB&J or Banana Split? Oh ho ho, well you’re in luck: we’ve got a family-sized box of every kid’s favorite dessert: corny fruit!

Look, I’m trying to be optimistic here, but Kellogg’s newest release is making that difficult. In what’s being billed as a “first of its kind cereal mashup”—very debatable when you look at Lucky Charms Frosted Flakes or even Kellogg’s own All Together Cereal—Kellogg’s Mashups is putting Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops in the same box.

Lately I’ve been critical of Kellogg’s for making so many bland sugar ring cereals disguised as ‘vanilla‘ or ‘birthday cake,’ and this inaugural Mashup isn’t really a good sign of waxing creativity. While I can see future imaginative potential for Mashups like Apple Jacks + Krave or Eggo Cereal + Honey Smacks, simply compounding the sweetness of Froot Loops while diluting the actual Frootiness of it has my stomach grumbling more so than rumbling. I would’ve much preferred to see Chocolate Frosted Flakes brought into play, or even Corn Pops feel like more exciting Froot Loop complements. Instead, we’ve got a box that looks more like a clumsy call for political unity than a mouthwatering breakfast concept.

But who knows: maybe some sort of magical chemistry will happen when Loops and Flakes are steeped in each other’s vacuum-sealed company for a while. If only there was a way to test this cereal combo for ourselves before these Mashups hit stores next months. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see, right?

Review: Chex Quest HD

Chex Quest HD Title

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 multiple articles 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

Review: Bones Electric Unicorn Fruity Cereal Coffee

Bones Electric Unicorn Fruity Cereal Coffee Review Bag

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

Spooned & Spotted: Lucky Charms with Red & Yellow Balloons

Children's Miracle Network Lucky Charms with Red & Yellow Balloons

If you’ve ever wanted enough sugary balloons for an amateur performance of Up starring Nena and Pennywise, then boy do General Mills and Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals have something that’ll float your sewer-in-the-sky-bound houseboat.

Exclusive to Costco (in, of course, twin-packed 1-pound boxes), Lucky Charms with only red and yellow balloon marshmallows are the latest collaboration between General Mills and the non-profit fundraising group for children’s hospitals, which does a lot of miraculous co-branding work in the month of May. This isn’t the first time Lucky Charms has debuted a variant with single marbit-focused color variants, but I don’t think the balloon marshmallow in particular has ever been given such a spotlight. Either way, the yellow balloons could easily double as lightbulbs for diorama re-creations of the Homestar Runner eating an incandescent sandwich.

Our thanks to Gabe Fonseca of Cereal Time for the tip. If you happen to spot a new cereal or breakfast product—of the many-hued marbit variety or otherwise—you can send them over at our Submissions page, or tweet them @cerealouslynet.

The Empty Bowl Episode Thirty-Two: The Triple Pop-Tart Conspiracy

If it feels like time keeps on slippin’ into the future, here’s your chance to put your flip-flopped foot down and say no: time isn’t slipping. It’s anchored to this single, calm second, on a peachy-keen breakfast beach along the milky shores separating last night’s dream from this morning’s bowl of cereal.

To all Empty Bowl newcomers, please remove your shoes and worries as you enter the thirty-second episode of my and Justin‘s meditative cereal podcast. On deck this time we have parallel cases of unorthodox cereal ownership, a licensed cereal 20,000 leagues better than Mario’s, and a great Blizzard inquiry.

Want to pause the everyday a little longer? We’ve got a half day’s worth of other episodes at our Anchor hub. You can also follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but each one warms my heart like Cinnamon Cheerios.