Lower your pitchforks, everyone!

I know: these new Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tarts aren’t cereal! This is heresy! I should be impeached as editor-in-chief of this site and replaced with a candidate who uses fewer parentheses and unnecessary similes (I use as many parentheses as a mathematician doodling emoticons on his master’s thesis)!

But just hear me out. I’ve previously mentioned my love of Pop-Tarts, and I still stand by it. The way I see it, no other snack better embodies the spirit of cereal quite like Pop-Tarts. They have shiny wrappers that make you giddy just looking at them. Their neon frosting and filling aren’t trying to hide for one second the fact that they’re crammed with enough delicious sugar to make an elephant twitch. And best of all, their addictive flavor practically begs you to mow through a stack of them while marathoning re-runs of Full House.

So if the Pope can be an honorary Harlem Globetrotter, Pop-Tarts can be an honorary breakfast cereal. And hey: maybe they’ll even go all the way again someday.

That’s why, when the news of Kellogg’s new Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tarts caused public outcry over the absurdity of something so over-the-top, I stood up and applauded to an empty room. Bravo, Kellogg’s: the crazier the better. Bring on the Cotton Candy Pop-Tarts! Bring on the Deep-Fried Twinkie Pop-Tarts!

But maybe I shouldn’t tattoo a Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tart onto my left bicep before actually trying one. So I tore open a dazzling foil packet and whiffed the pastries. The Tarts look like a snowy field that someone angrily squirted Heinz blue ketchup onto. They smell strongly of confectioner’s sugar and buttered flour with just a touch of vague, unidentifiable fruit.

Splitting a pastry in half, the filling is blindingly blue. Seriously, this stuff is toothpaste in both color and consistency, an ironic observation considering how tooth-meltingly sweet it is.

Biting into the gooey, alien guts of this futuristic, doughy creature, the thick frosting fires a sugary opening salvo at my tastebuds. This layer is fragile, but it packs a walloping load of cloying sweetness and light vanilla.

But just as my tongue begins to respond in the only gross way a tongue knows how in such situations—with a tsunami of mouth-watering saliva—I’m abruptly slammed with a slightly puckering, and glaringly artificial fruit tartness. It’s the filling, and it has the same flavor and mouthfeel as a Blue Raspberry Jolly Rancher pureed with milk and powdered sugar.

Bringing up the rear end of my dramatic eating experience is the more level-headed finish of buttery, crumbly dough that comes from the Tart’s baked crust.

The difficulty with this Pop-Tart is that the satisfaction acquired from each bite is a matter of ratios. Bites with just crust come off as bland, gritty, and a little chalky. Bites with pure filling are too intensely rich and processed for my aged tastebuds to handle (though I can see an 8 year old devouring it with glee, and possibly even excessively spreading raspberry jam on top).

But those bites, those rare few bites that strike a symphonic balance between crust, frosting, and filling: oh, you better believe those bites are blissful. The fruit flavor puts a unique spin on what you would typically get from a Pop-Tart without straying into “gimmicky novelty” territory. Though I hesitate to call it “raspberry;” the fruit filling leans closer to “blue strawberry” on the sweet-tart scale.

So if you want to indulge your wilder, youthful spirit, these are certainly worth a try, simply for the experience of “a tsunami of mouth-watering saliva” (my apologies to the easily grossed-out).

Oh, wait, don’t leave just yet! I suddenly remembered what the color of these Pop-Tarts’ filling reminds me of! Since this wouldn’t be a Cerealously review if it didn’t include a reference to a long-forgotten snack food, let me tell you that the blue raspberry goo here perfectly matches the hue of Ore-Ida’s Jimmy Neutron Funky Fries!

How’s that for obscure?

The “Bowl:” Frosted Blue Raspberry Pop-Tarts

The Breakdown: Intergalactic blue filling is too intense to handle on its own, but when tamed by the stern butteriness of the crust, they make a radioactive blue and white yin-yang.

The Bottom Line: 8 slam-dunking Popes out of 10