Look, I know, deep down, that I am but a flake fragment stuck between two cogs within the grand corporate cereal machine, but can’t a crumb dream of being a marbit?
By this I mean: I seriously doubt anything I’ve written on this website has ever influenced a cerealsmith’s grand designs—though if Blueberry Muffin Toasters hits shelves, I will claim peripheral clout by right of Justinian association. But in my imagination, I like to pretend that something like Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal was made with a picture of me on an easel, connected with string to a bran map of all my favorite flavor descriptors.
Yes, that sounds narcissistic, but my birthday is next week, so give me a break.
And yes, I know, unsubtly mentioning my upcoming birthday isn’t much better.
C’mon though, a merger of Oreo O’s and Pop-Tarts? Sure, they could’ve picked any of my more-obscure, all-time favorite Pop-Tarts (Milk Chocolate Graham, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, or Maple Brown Sugar Oatmeal Delight), but the only cereals more quintessentially dan g. would be a PB&J Waffle Crisp or Gingerbread Golden Grahams!
Ahem, Post and General Mills? Next week, remember? You’re not invited to my all-night laser tag lock-in without presents.
Okay, enough about me: let’s write about these little sandwich cookie pillows entirely in the second and third persons.
One thing is clear right off the bat: if you had misgivings about the rebooted Pop-Tart Cereal series after its first two dubious installments, Cookies & Crème is an improvement in every way. For where Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon had their interesting fillings betrayed by thick (with at least three C’s, in the colloquial sense), obfuscatory biscuit shells, Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts boasts a chip-specked exoskeleton whose Evangelion-busting synchronization rate plays hyper-nicely with what’s piloting it.
And for a simple reason: chocolate. Chocolate-on-chocolate combos are way easier to get right in a cereal than the comparative complexities of Strawberry & Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and in C&C, Kellogg’s gets it more than right: they get it three lefts. The cereal shell is actually remarkably similar to (American) Oreo O’s, with half-dark chocolate overtones, a cocoa-buttery sheen, and a toasted sugar coating on top of that. It’s not quite fudgy or dense—picture an ego-boosted Cocoa Puff—but that’s where the filling and outer regalia come in.
As with any pillowy cereal, the epic ribbons of gooey crème that’ve been enlarged to show texture are much thinner in reality, but they, along with the chocolate bits studding the shell, nevertheless pack a charming one-two punch. The chocolate sprinkle–chips bring more concentrated, milky sweetness to their darker-beaned vesicle, while the crème is especially modest in expression. But this works to Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal’s advantage, as instead of taking the marbit approach, which would distract from the layers of chocolatey nuance, these inner dollops bring a unifying…well…creaminess that ironically wraps the whole experience up in a fluffy little bow.
This creaminess also makes Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal my milk’s favorite cookie–pastry. Like a loving hen warming (or in this case, cooling) her unhatched chicks, Milk softens the cereal pieces’ crunchy shells under you spoon them up and chew them into a richly cocoa’d, buttercreamy and vanilla veneered scramble.
Uh, actually…maybe live barn animals wasn’t the most appetizing analogy here.
What matters is that Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts may very well be better than Oreo O’s. Whereas the Americanized latter tones down the potency of its South Korean counterpart, these Pop-Tartlets land somewhere in the middle, pairing a familiarly delightful shell with pops of layered sweetness to break up the boring homogeny (or poor rationing) found in other chocolate cereals.
It’s not perfect—the shell’s taste could still stand to be a little more aggressive, and there is a lot of of empty airspace inside that could fit more filling—but Cookies & Crème presents a thoughtful and no-doubt impactful evolution of the Pop-Tarts Cereal brand, not just opening but kicking down doors for more flavors in the future. In lieu of pointed demands, this blogger merely leaves Kellogg’s with the following disclaimer:
If the above dream of Milk Chocolate Graham Pop-Tarts Cereal is next, could you at least dedicate a room in your headquarters to this site for the idea? “The Cerealously.net Executive Restroom” will do. As long as there’s wi-fi in there.
The Bowl: Cookies & Crème Pop-Tarts Cereal
The Breakdown: Heavy on the chocolate and just right on the complementary cream, this well-crafted reconstruction of the Oreo O’s formula succeeds where its round cousin lags behind: actually having something good sandwiched inside it.
The Bottom Line: 9.5 uncatchable Golden Graham Gingerbread Men out of 10
I and my man love your cereal but only cookies and cream flavor. We have not found it at walmart but did discover Ollie’s store stocked it. But we don’t often go there as it’s out of our city. I’m disappointed. PS I hate strawberry flavor cereal.
I think the Hershey cookie n creme is much better. More flavor of the cereal instead of cardboard. And I think the way the two cereal are packaged has a lot to do with howfresh it stays. I don’t like how soggy the pop tart cookie n creme cereal gets. I think the reason I love the Hershey cookies n creme so much is it’s crunchy til the last bite and has more flavor nothing like any other cereal I’ve tasted different texture different everything. Just my point of view.
Is this better, worse, or just as good as the new Hershey’s Cookies and Cream Fillows cereal?
It’s tough to say, since I like them both a lot. They have similar flavor profiles, but the Fillows are much richer and heavier, making it difficult to eat a lot of them. C&C Pop-Tarts is much easier to eat in traditional cereal serving sizes, so I’d call them slightly better.