What makes a balanced breakfast?

Cereal commercials will have you believe it calls for toast, fruit, milked cereal, another glass of milk, maybe like a sausage?, and some OJ for good measure. Despite such a figurative feast’s skewed carbo-hydrating to protein ratio, it’s still probably a better balanced breakfast than what I had in mind: a bowl of Rice Krispies in one hand and Cocoa Krispies in the other—each precariously perched on a card-tower of respective Confetti Cupcake and Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts.

Perfectly balanced, as all impending stomachaches should be.

That said, I’m really excited to work Kellogg’s new Rice Krispies Treats Snap Crackle Poppers into my balanced breakfast. Why, you ask? Because they’d make quite the square meal.

Nothing quite like 100 words of buildup to a two-word punchline. Anyway, for those still with me after that egregious comedy sin, it’s time to do some sweet penance: a three-part munchline of creamily coated and cubed Rice Krispies!

Rice Krispies Treats – Vanilla Créme Snap Crackle Poppers Review

“Vanilla” has many cultural connotations: unassuming, inoffensive, unadorned, even a common autocorrection of Godzilla’s son’s name. And despite the pejorative use of those meanings, Vanilla Créme Snap Crackle Poppers manages to embody all of those things in a charming way—well, minus the atomic breath, at least.

To mentally experience the cubin’ nature of any Snap Crackle Poppers flavor, you need only imagine a normal Rice Krispies Treat that learned the three-inch punch technique from Kill Bill. That is to say, each bite packs all the deliciousness of an entire Rice Krispies Treat into a small amount of sugar-dense space. With each layer of thick, creamy coating, Snap Crackle Poppers have all the marshmallow and none of the fluff. Gone are the sedimentary strata of boring, airy rice: all hail this crisply doughy new order.

While this is all well and good, Vanilla Créme Snap Crackle Poppers unfortunately don’t do much else to distance themselves from a truly vanilla, generically sweetened Rice Krispies Treat. There are certainly notes of wispy vanilla in the aftertaste—picture the breezy vanilla syrup of a vanilla soda—but just like a marshmallow and my own vanilla-frosted hair tips, these Poppers’ ‘mallowy and vanilla undertones end up irreparably gumming together. Not a bad start to my three-part brunchlet (the snack immediately preceding brunch, duh), but I look forward to how more complex flavors will dunk on this already coffee dunk-able base taste.

The Bottom Line: 7 boxes of Kaiju Krunch out of 10

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Rice Krispies Treats – Chocolatey Snap Crackle Poppers Review

If vanilla is the reliable homebody of quintessential sweet flavoring, then chocolate is perhaps one of the least predictable. From pyroclastic cake filling to the fleeting pops of a brown sprinkle’s gloss, there are just so many different possible chocolate profiles a crackling mainstream snack could tackle (whereas rich vanilla typically costs a premium).

The rocky roadworked coating around Chocolatey Snap Crackle Poppers isn’t quite as thickly fudgy as its appearance mighty suggest, but it is nevertheless fudge adjacent. Tasting like the excavated foundation of an off-brand Fudge Stripe (or maybe a real, defective one, if Kellogg’s is being thrifty), Chocolatey Snap Crackle Poppers are more rich with intrigue than Vanilla Créme, but they don’t have quite enough wealth of flavor to make them more than a one-bag purchase.

In fact, they really just encouraged me to go see a movie…so I could blow my life savings on two big boxes of Buncha Crunch and have enough privacy to recklessly suck them down.

The Bottom Line: 7.5 chocolate lava Cheesequakes out of 10

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Rice Krispies Treats – Cookies ‘n’ Créme Snap Crackle Poppers Review

Thought I was being too harsh on scoring the last two flavors? That’s because these Cookies ‘n’ Créme Treats are the unequivocal créme of the snap-crackling crop—to the point where I’d be happy to ceremonially discontinue the other two (now-irrelevant) flavors with a Spartan kick out of my second-floor window.

Entirely unlike the lackluster letdown that was full-sized Cookies ‘N’ Creme Rice Krispies Treats, these Snap Crackle Poppers actually taste like their distant Oreo influences. Well, for half the bite, at least: the inaugural (and less exciting) 50% of chews that go into each Popper taste almost exactly like Vanilla Créme, but the crispy caboose brings in mouthwatering ribbons of cocoa butter and a liquefied Zebra Cake. Buttercreamy and speckled with subtle chocolate goodness, the second half of a C’n’C Snap Crackle Popper is addictive enough to have you staggering bites to make sure one of them is always in full Hydroxian bloom.

Speaking of germination: I’d love to plant one of these in a dirt pie cup and let the worms go wild.

The Bottom Line: 8.5 snack cake distilleries out of 10

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Every flavor of Rice Krispies Treats SCP (wait, that’s the abbreviation? I’ll probably get vaporized when I digest these, won’t I?) is good, but my only logical hypothesis is that Kellogg’s, once realizing the inherent gastro-superiority of Cookies ‘n’ Créme, decided they needed milder, buffer varieties to safely ladder the common public’s palate up to them—hence how the cookie flavor within the Poppers ramps up from comparative boringness, too. Had I started with Cookies ‘n’ Créme, I fear the disappointment of the other two could have rendered me motionlessly mopey.

I recommend you try Cookies ‘n’ Creme Snap Crackle Poppers for sure—pop one into your cupholder for best results; winter only makes ’em crunchier—but the others could easily be replaced with a similar pouched or movie theater-boxed product. Unless, of course, you want to wedge a Cookies ‘n’ Créme Popper between two Chocolatey ones to really spite the rounder* folks at Nabisco.

*I promise I’m only talking about snack geometry.