Review: Target’s Market Pantry Cereal Bowl Ice Cream

Market Pantry Cereal Bowl Ice Cream Review Cinnamon Toast Packaging

Cereal and milk have a deep, cosmic soul bond. This is known.

Naturally, we’ve seen enough cereal-infused milkshakes and ice creams to leave us brain-frozen ’til the cows come home.

But where’s the cerealized justice for other dairy delicacies? Sure, Trix basically defined the cereal–yogurt game so hard that it discouraged all competition and ultimately discontinued itself—except for one place, I guess? But despite my mildly discomforting, yet nevertheless ignored lactose intolerance, I demand more. I want Cocoa Krispies Kefir. Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch Butter. Heck, give me Frosted Flakes Cottage Cheese, I’ll eat it. But only if it’s large curd, of course.

It’s not that I’m tired of cereal-flavored ice cream, it’s just that, in cases like Target’s new store-brand Market Pantry Cereal Bowl Ice Cream, the concept can easily feel uninspired. Like, “oh, this cereal tastes like pieces of bootleg Cinnamon Roast Munch? Gotcha, so it’s Cinnamon Ice Cream.”

Err, maybe I’m not giving enough credit to a potential “cereal milk” factor here. I’d better reserve judgement until I’m doubled over on the couch, looking for the right adjectives in between stomach-garglings more intestinally eviscerating than swallowed mouthwash. No pain, no bloggerly gain! Continue reading

Review: Kraft Jet-Puffed Lucky Charms Magical Marshmallows

General Mills Kraft Jet-Puffed Lucky Charms Magical Marshmallows Review Bag

Imagine if you bit into a Twinkie, and it tasted like a stick of margarine.

Picture this: your fully factorized cheesecake is naught but Crisco and gelatin.

Or perhaps you wake up tomorrow, and your mom’s chocolate-chip cookies are actually worse than oatmeal raisin in disguise: they taste like unsweetened raisins and uncooked instant oats.

That’s the type of disappointment you can expect from Kraft’s new Jet-Puffed Lucky Charms Magical Marshmallows. Yes, I was already put on guard when ordering these online—to this day, my conspiracy theory is that, since Kellogg’s and Post were founded in Michigan, General Mills has cursed us with poor product distribution—because all online listings for these bear impressively unanimous one-star reviews. And it’s not hard to see why. Continue reading

News: Magic Spoon Seasonal Cereal Flavors

Magic Spoon Holiday Seasonal Cereal Flavors

The holiday season and healthiness are forever at odds.

On one hand, we have Thanksgiving foods like stuffing, sweet potato casserole, and all manner of gravy-glazed paraphernalia. And in the other hand, I have about two-dozen sugar cookies.

Look, it’s not the holiday season if you aren’t double-fisting and and doubling your fitting size.

But while most of us will be poppin’ buttons ’til we pop the last bottle on New Year’s Eve, Magic Spoon wants to make autumnal–winter flavor a little less embiggening.

If you recall, I reviewed Magic Spoon’s core four flavors not too long ago, deeming the brand, by and large, the most flavorful option for cereal lovers looking for a cereal with specifically streamlined nutritional info. Sure, it’s comparatively expensive and tastes like biomedically fortified Swole Cereal, but as long as you don’t expect a Lucky Charms or Cocoa Puffs, Magic Spoon delivers on its high protein, low carb promises.

And while many of these premium cereal startups tend to stick to a few flavors—as breakfast entrepreneurship is no doubt difficult when competing with billion-dollar brands—Magic Spoon has launched two new flavors to go toe-to-cloves-to-bowtie with the likes of Pumpkin Spice Cheerios and Boo Berry. Sure, blueberry and pumpkin are both familiar cereal aisle flavors by this point, but the addition of chai into the Pumpkin Chai variety is what really has my mind reeling like a barista trying to remember the components of a Pennywise Frappuccino.

You see this, General Mills? You just gonna let them corner the chai cereal market? Sounds like if you don’t drop a Chai-nnamon Toast Crunch sometime soon, you might be Magic-ally out of business. Just my perspective, at least.

Toast or not toast, you can buy a four-pack of these flavors on Magic Spoon’s website.

Review: Kellogg’s Elf on the Shelf Cereal

Kellogg's New Elf on the Shelf Cereal Review Box

Picture this:

It’s around 1:00 a.m. on the first of November in this year of MMXIX.

I’ve just returned home in a candy-corned stupor from some manner of haunted manor revelry, only to find a startling scene.

My box of Elf on the Shelf Cereal—the exhausting full name of which is Kellogg’s The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition: Sugar Cookie Cereal with Marshmallows—had toppled from its sturdy coffee table standing onto the living room floor, while meters away, my dear impressionable cat’s food bowl had been knocked across the kitchen floor.

Could some freak breeze or errant radio frequency have unseated the box, triggering my chubby son’s bite and/or flight instinct? Sure.

But could some freaky malevolent watchdog elf have manifested as a cardboard projection, siphoning sustenance from cat kibble before rifling through my unmentionables? Also sure.

One thing’s for certain: good or bad, I need to eat this whole cereal. Only then can I break my homestead free from the decked-out thralls of the shelved elf’s limply puppeted surveillance state.

So you’ve heard of the Elf on the Shelf, but now get ready for A Sentry in Your Pantry. Continue reading

Review: Creepy Cocoa Crisp M&M’s

Creepy Cocoa Crisp M&M's Review Bag

Happy Halloween! Boy do I have a trick and a treat up my sleeve (where it isn’t melting; just in my mouth) for you. In fact, the trick is the treat:

BOO! I’m not actually reviewing a cereal today! In fact, it’s nothing you should eat for breakfast at all—well, except on Halloween, when all servings can be called “fun sized” as long as you’re having fun eating them.

They’re called Creepy Cocoa Crisp M&M’s, and based solely on the Faux-coa Krispies rendered on the bag, I’m calling this an officially unofficial Halloween Cereal. In vaguely spooky colors of red, orange and brown (why can’t they release special edition jet-black M&M’s filled with, oh I don’t know, glowstick juice?), Creepy Cocoa Crisp M&M’s, otherwise known as C³M², are jumbo dark chocolate morsels filled with an aptly and vaguely named “Cocoa Crisp Center.”

All I’m gonna say before opening the bag is that, since Mars couldn’t be edgy enough to give Red the Beelzebub costume he was born to wear, they better at least make his bat-winged brooch the prize inside. Continue reading

Review: Kellogg’s All Together Cereal

Kellogg's All Together Cereal Review Box

Cereal mixology is a topic close to my heart.

Granted, I don’t actually mix cereals often—usually when I’m running uncomfortably low on one and/or the other cereal—but the infinite conceptual liberty that comes from architecting palate-impacting pairings that transform a familiar cereal experience into a work of edible interpretive art. And that’s before you add different milks to the equation!

There are obvious mixes, like Donettes + Honey Bun Cereal + Milky Coffee.

There are weirder ideas, like Banana Creme Frosted Flakes + Millville Peanut Butter & Jelly Puffs + Vanilla Almond Milk + Maple Syrup (I call it “An Unforgettable Bruncheon”).

And then there are mixes so uncouth and dubious that they border on cereal slander. Mixes like the one proposed and encouraged (but never confidently owned) by Kellogg’s in its All Together Cereal.

Kellogg's All Together Cereal Review Mini Boxes

Released in support of GLAAD and LGBTQ+ youth for Spirit Day, All Together Cereal is a $20 novelty box stuffed with six miniature cereal boxes that, theoretically, you’re meant to gob all up in the same bowl as a symbol of intersectional solidarity. Of course, when you realize that Kellogg’s is only donating up to $50,000, a ‘stunning’ 1/258,640 of their annual revenue, All Together Cereal becomes a pretty obvious face for Rainbow Capitalism.

So while the concept is good-natured and silly, it has its share of ethical undoings before even cracking it open. But hey, might as well see just how offensive the proposed cereal concoction is, too! Continue reading

The Empty Bowl Episode Twenty-One: Life’s Deepest Divisions

Welcome back to The Empty 𝘽𝙊𝙊!-wl.

There, now that you’re properly petrified from that mid-sentence jump scare, you’re also in luck, because the latest (and last episode before Halloween) of The Empty Bowl is 31 minutes of creepy-calming cereal shop-talking. Join Justin and I as we get salty about Pop-Tart shells, review my mortally damning Grape-Nuts crime, and catch you up on the eye-popping hereditary history of Halloween Froot Loops.

If there’s something strange in your mental neighborhood, you can call on nineteen other episodes of cereal stress-busting at our Anchor hub, follow along on Twitter, or send in a listener question. We can’t discuss or respond to every email, but each one makes me eat a bowl of cereal. My life’s in your hands.

News: Hershey Kisses Cereal and Trolls Trix with Marshmallows

New Hershey's Kisses Cereal & Trolls Trix with Marshmallows

Never before has a new cereal pairing sounded so much like a Cosmopolitan quiz.

Are you a Kiss, or a Troll? We can tell you in one question

And that question would be something along the lines of:

If you could pick a sexy location for making whoopie, which would you choose:

A) The bathroom at a fancy fondue joint
B) Under a dumpy bridge

No matter your alignment, I think it’s tough to be upset with either of General Mills’ two upcoming cereals—which we know about thanks entirely to @sega_retro_revival. Continue reading