I’m glad you’re here! Hurry: put on my latest invention, the NostalgiGoggles 3000. We’ve got an important journey to take—a journey to your elementary school cafeteria!

*cue Sci-Fi whooshing noises, rainbow-colored swirling portals, Cacodemons, and other time travel imagery that doesn’t go over so well in text*

Phew, we made it. It’s the year [INSERT YOUR 3RD GRADE YEAR HERE] and the lunch bell has just gone off. Geography pop quizzes can’t get our spirits down when we have processed snacks and juice boxes on the way!

Our best friends all get in the hot lunch line with their crumpled dollar bills and milk money. We’re a little jealous, because today is Bosco Breadstick Day, but we’re still happy as we plunk down at our faux-wood paneled table, because Mom’s cryptic smile this morning told us she was packing something good.

Spilling our brown paper bags onto the table (which still smells strongly of the Lunch Lady’s Clorox wipes) the sight of PB&J Pop-Tarts makes our mouth water.

Who needs ooey-gooey cheese sticks when you can have ooey-gooey, oh-so-nutty pastries?

We make sure to extract the pastries carefully, because they come packaged in rad golden foil pouches that we fully intend to use as sleeping bags for our G.I. Joes later.

They aren’t the prettiest Tarts, with uneven smatterings of sprinkles, cracked icing, and big oily puddles. But that’s okay. After all, when’s the last time anyone’s made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich worthy of the Louvre?

We each take a synchronized bite, and oooh, is it creamy! With a buttery, sweet nuttiness and a heaping helping of oiliness, the PB in these pastries is like raw Reese’s Cup innards that got worked over by a rolling pin ’til they were perfectly smooth.

Like the love note Mom packed alongside the Oreos, the sprinkles and icing don’t taste like much (we all tried eating paper once back in the day, right?), but they are nonetheless important for the meal’s giddy aesthetic.

As for the ribboned strawberry “jelly,” it’s equally sweet, with the kind of potent and syrupy fruit cocktail flavor you’d find at the bottom of a Dole fruit cup. Thankfully, Mom also packed at least three of those bad boys too, so we take a brief Pop-Tart intermission to suck them down.

So even though the PB lacks any salty punch, and the jelly is more “fruit punch” than authentic strawberry, these Pop-Tarts’ taste a lot like real PB&J sandwichs. That’s because of the perfectly flaky, golden-baked shell—it pleasantly bookends the intense filling with a tame, floury flavor that’s just like a good ol’ slice of Wonder Bread (with the crusts not cut off).

Leaning over in drooling jealousy, Randy offers to trade us his second Bosco Breadstick for our second pastries. We tell Randy to buzz off by blowing exaggerated raspberries; we aren’t trading these delicious rectangles for anything less than a pack of Dunk-a-Roos and a whole sleeve of Do-si-dos.

Ready to step up our pastry game, we trek to the cafeteria’s lone toaster to brown our second Pop-Tarts. After the kid ahead of us finishes toasting his LEGO Eggo Waffles, it’s our turn to smugly make the whole room smell of roasted peanuts. (Don’t worry: no one at this school has a nut allergy. Mom Checked.)

Toasting does great things to the appearance of our Pop-Tarts. The icing becomes a scorched battlefield, filled with exploded sprinkle land mines. The crust also tastes even better, as toasting makes it crispy, warm, and caramelized.

The PB&J filling is now completely goo-ified into a single substance now, too. But even though it’s neat to eat what is, essentially, a blended jar of Smuckers Strawberry Goobers, at least one of us agrees that it’s more satisfying to taste the peanut butter and jelly individually.

Lunch is over, and after failing our 5th period geography test (how were we supposed to know that the capital of Kentucky is Frankfort? We thought that was another name for hot dogs!), we sprint home and shove another pack of PB&J Pop-Tarts into the freezer for the sake of “science.”

We play countless games of Goldeneye 64 to pass the time, and I always pick Oddjob because I’m a dirty cheater. Once the pastries are adequately frozen, we bite in and relish in the chilled goodness. The peanut butter and jelly was creamy before, but now it’s ice creamy! It’s like strawberry ice cream with peanut butter sundae sauce, to be more precise. We highly recommend it to Skeletor and all of our Beetleborgs.

Okay, we’ve had our fun, but let’s head back to 2016 to state our final thoughts on PB&J Pop-Tarts.

*whoosh*

All in all, these are fantastic Pop-Tarts. Though I wish they had the salty nuttiness of Peanut Butter Puffins and perhaps the tarter jelly filling of Trader Joe’s Cherry Pomegranate Toaster Pastries, PB&J Pop-Tarts still capture all of the sloppy, goopy goodness that make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a childhood classic.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s getting late, and I have to tuck Cobra Commander into his golden foil bedroll.

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The “Bowl:” Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Gone Nutty! Frosted PB&J Strawberry

The Breakdown: The oily gooeyness of these pastries bring back warm grade school memories. The processed flavor isn’t perfect, but hey, who can complain when their mouth is glued shut by sticky and fruity peanut buttery deliciousness?

The Bottom Line: 9 million dollar ideas for “PB&J ice cream sandwiches” out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 190 calories, 1 gram of fiber, 19 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein per 1 pastry serving)