Welcome to Marshmallow Monday: a series I just invented that celebrates everyone’s favorite squishy sugar spheroids.

Mandatory Marshmallow Monday activities include playing games of Chubby Bunny, choking down pretzel marshmallow Jell-O dessert leftovers that have been in the freezer since last Thanksgiving, and sacrificing a flaming s’more to the box of Lucky Charms Marshmallows Only that sits above my fireplace.

Oh, and reviewing a marshmallow cereal, of course. Today’s is none other than Kellogg’s new Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows!

As you can see, Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows contain Frosted Flakes and marshmallows. As for the flavor, Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows tastes like Frosted Flakes…just with marshmallows.

Thank you for reading my review of Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows!

 

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Oh, fine: I’ll give it a closer look.

Between the powdered marbit snowballs and the powdery flakes themselves, this cereal looks like a blizzard in June. But considering how my current “beat the summer heat” strategy is to strategically place popsicles in my cheeks, ears, and navel, a little winter flair in my cereal never hurts.

If you’ve had Frosted Flakes before, the base taste won’t surprise you. If you’ve never had Frosted Flakes before, I’d first like to say that I’m sorry your childhood breakfasts were merely good and not grrreat. These sugar-coated corn flakes are sticky with granulated vanilla sweetness—so much of it that you can’t actually taste any corn outside of a faint, malted corn aftertaste.

Just imagine someone carefully sliced the glaze off a donut and slapped it on chunks of cornmeal.

From a crunchological standpoint (I majored in Crunchology at Cap’n Crunch’s Nautical Chew-niversity), Frosted Flakes are the definition of average: crunchy enough to satisfy, but soft enough to safely feed to your little sister so she won’t complain when you switch the channel from My Little Pony to Transformers.

Of course, this crunch is challenged by the half-chewy, half-chalky marshmallow blobs scattered throughout. They taste exactly like the coating on every Frosted Flake: raw, vaguely creamy white sugar. But this time there’s no mild corn base to balance it, so eating a spoonful of mostly marshmallows quickly becomes a cloying exercise in “undoing all the exercise I did this week.”

Adding milk produces an interesting polarization effect, as it divides Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows into a sweet-mild yin-yang.

The glistening flakes have their sugar stripped, leaving behind pleasantly plain and golden corn bits. Meanwhile, the marshmallows practically melt into the already sugar-enhanced milk to produce a tidal wave of endmilk with enough saccharine buzz to resuscitate a tranquilized elephant.

All in all, though, I remain a bit disappointed in Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows. Sure, they could be a nostalgic way to bounce off the walls for a couple hours, but when you already have a mouthful of sugary flakes, it’s hard to even notice the vaguely chewy, mostly gritty ‘mallow pucks.

I could have forgiven Kellogg’s if they had chosen a more interesting marshmallow shape. Unless these lazy white niblets are supposed to represent coughed-up hairballs of Tony the Tiger’s chest fur, their shape doesn’t fit the theme. Call me when you’ve got neon orange tiger paw marshmallows, Tony.

I think Kellogg’s just needs their own breakthrough cereal. I wouldn’t even mind if they released “Tiny Tonys” to compete with General Mills Tiny Toast, as long as their food scientists consider the words of Ian Malcolm next time they think about cramming boring marshmallows into an already popular cereal:

your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should

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The Bowl: Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows

The Breakdown: The marshmallows are barely taste-able and the cereal’s nearly too sweet even for me; unless you’re a NASA engineer studying sugar-propelled human rockets, stick with standard Frosted Flakes.

The Bottom Line: 4 Crunchology doctoral theses out of 10

***Check out what our friends at Junk Banter and Snack Cellar thought of Frosted Flakes with Marshmallows!***

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 110 calories, 0 grams of fiber, 12 grams of sugar, and 1 gram of protein per 3/4 cup serving)