Since the first Pop-Tart was piped full of sweet goo and flapped over like an Agatha Crispy book…since that first Pop-Tart thwapped out of the toaster with enough velocity to spook the family dog two feet into the air…and since the first celestially blessed starchild opened a Pop-Tart pouch to find three inside instead of two…I’ve been on this blog, prolonging the intro to an ice cream review like it’s an SAT essay to delay the inevitable post-lactose malaise of eating it.
And right on schedule, here I am: with a Good Humor Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tart bar sitting lusterlessly on a plate before me. Clearly just palette swapping the Strawberry Shortcake bars that are perhaps Good Humor’s most iconic, these Pop-Tarts bars bring the other most beloved toaster pastry flavor into the chilled spotlight of the freezer aisle.
Alright, I’ve made peace with myself and my god, and am ready to plunge deep into dire dairy digestive disarray—yes, I use alliteration as a coping mechanism. Continue reading →
For one spice, cinnamon sure wears a lot of hats. Just like Sailor Moon with her disguise pen, cinnamon can be just about anything: the faint infusion grounding Cinnamon Toast Crunch’s hyper sweetness. The sinful spear wielded by a Hot Tamale. Or the soon-to-be-regretted cornerstone ingredient in the tempting elixir known as Rumchata (or the more nefarious, Fireball).
The point is that, though it’s simple to write off the likes of Cinnamon Cheerios as ‘just another cinnamon cereal,’ the rich historical matrix of cinnamon cereals proves that very few of them—from Cinnabon Cereal to Cinnamon Crunch Krave—present the exact same shade of auburn delight. So while your first reaction—as mine was—to Cinnamon Cheerios may be “oh, it’s just Diet Oat Crunch,” I’m happy to report that not only are Cinnamon Cheerios a wonderful gluten-free option for cinnamon cereal fans, but their approach to cinnamon is different enough to make both worthy of a place in your pantry.
But I’ve said too much: let’s start from the top of the bowl. Continue reading →
In what initially feels like a redundant regression—imagine, after half a decade enjoying the GameCube, Nintendo dropped the N65—General Mills is bringing Cinnamon Cheerios to shelves as we speak. It sounds like quite the downgrade from Cheerios Cinnamon Oat Crunch, but since these Cinnamon Cheerios are gluten-free, they still fill an important niche for those who want spicy-sweet Cheerios without the stomach-upsetting starch.
As General Mills already has extensive experience with cinnamon in the Toast Crunchiverse, I have to wonder whether Cinnamon Cheerios will share CTC’s oh-so-sweet approach to cinnamon, or if it will be a more wholesome, tempered, and gut-warming experience. Either way, I’ve already heard early spottings of Cinnamon Cheerios in stores, so whether you have a vendetta against gluten or granola, these auburn rings might be worth (safely) seeking out.
You know, I’m really starting to think this Sponged Robert character might take off. I mean look at him: he’s the epitome of glee, teaches kids basic geometry, and I’ve never even seen him do a Fortnite dance yet!
Maybe he belongs beside Mario at the virtual Olympics.
All Fry Cook Games aside, Nickelodeon & Kellogg’s licensed push for SpongeBob’s upcoming Sponge on the Run movie is continuing its run of admittedly uninspired breakfast tie-ins with these Sea Berry Pop-Tarts, already listed on Walmart.com. Continue reading →
And now, the real thing? I demand to know the astrological significance of experiencing so many cinnamon-spiced chilly bois in constellation. Will someone I’m close to become hot and cold toward me? Will I be dead by June after a defrosted Crazy Square eats me from the inside like an Antarctic alien?
Whether I’m able to shape-shift into a fleshy spoon in time to eat Edy’s & Dreyer’s new Cinnamon Toast Crunch (Light) Ice Cream, I’m confident it will be a product whose quality is best measured in increments of time: 10 minutes to snarf it down out of 10 hours of lactose-induced remorse.
Thanks to Candy Hunting and The Junk Food Aisle who broke this story (it has since been spotted in stores), we also know there is a Lucky Charms Light Ice Cream debuting in tandem with CTC’s. Though there isn’t a photo yet, I have to imagine it will be an oatmeal ice cream swirled with (hopefully rainbow) marshmallow fluff. The kind of thing that sounds better as a trendy latte.
Because while marshmallow in ice cream is like adding whipped cream to a glass of oat milk, I can at least get excited about melting a Cinnamon Toast Crunch pint over a sieve and refining the cinnamon sugar dust into a handsome necklace.
Look, I know I’ve always said it’s my dream to one day be credited on Wikipedia for a distinguished contribution to cereal-kind—I’m picturing a front-page New York Times piece on my exhumation of the Lost Tomb of Yummy Mummy. But now I’m starting to think finding a place in Pop-Tarts’ extended mythos might be easier. I can see it now:
“Noted breakfast influencer and Fillows fill-anthropist Bran Goubert [of course I’d change my name for the clout] was the 21st century’s strongest advocate for the freezing of Pop-Tarts, a technique now so commonplace that Kellogg’s has relocated their entire retail pastry inventory between the shredded hash browns and single-serving pot pies.”
Now I know, I know: freezing Pop-Tarts has been a thing for a long time, but I certainly got a lot more flak from toaster troubadours in my early blogging years for explicitly condoning the practice. Maybe I just need to be bolder about my advocacy. Choreograph a Gurdjieffian dance around a giant cooling coil or something.
While I wait for my sluggish notoriety to thaw, I can nevertheless celebrate Pop-Tarts’ latest validation of frozen Pop-Tarts as a concept, ideal and life philosophy. Kellogg’s pastry-smiths have teamed up with the agreeable folks at Good Humor to launch Brown Sugar Cinnamon Ice Cream Technically ‘Dairy Dessert’ Bars. To say I’m excited for this is an understatement, and to say my lactose intolerance disagrees with this excitement would certainly be an easy-to-ignore statement. Given how famous Good Humor’s Strawberry Shortcake Bars already are, it makes sense for them to tackle the brand’s other biggest spokes-Tart. We’re treated here to two layers of (presumably vanilla) and brown sugar cinnamon-infused cow product, but what’s really got me ready to put sole to pavement for these bars is that beautiful gravelly coating.
Looking like the inside of my bag after a brief sojourn to the beach, these crispety-crunchities are almost sure to be what makes these Good Humor Pop-Tarts Bars so good you can taste them in your humerus. As they’re already on Good Humor’s website, these bars should be popping up in stores any time now. Guess it’s time to start parceling out my Lactaid pills until the next ice age—if I tragically can’t go down in Pop-Tartian history, I at least want my tear-diluted dairy delicacies to go down easy.
Probably because crustular isn’t a real word, let alone an FDA-approved one. Though one could consider it an antonym of ‘cromulent.’
Pop-Tarts varieties have gotten wilder than a berry in recent years, with a number of crazy flavors and gimmicks that weren’t necessarily crazy good by extension. But through it all, Kellogg’s wasn’t able to open up their third eye to see the true opportunity for creativity that lies in a Pop-Tart’s largely unmodified third component—arguably the most fundamentally important component. The crust.
I struggle to think of many Pop-Tarts with crust that tastes like anything more than “classic puff pastry” and “chocolate puff pastry.” There’s Red Velvet, but that’s really just clown chocolate. Perhaps the only worthy ancestral analogue I can think of for these crust-bending Pretzel Pop-Tarts would be Kellogg’s line of weirdly wonderful Peanut Butter Pop-Tarts. With a more crumbly and baked-cookie-esque crust, that trilogy of PB, Choco PB & PB&J cemented themselves as an unforgettable, holy trinity of revelatory revolutions in Pop-Tarchitecture.
So why did it take Kellogg’s so long to break the expensive factory mold again?
And was it worth it?
Okay, if we assume the “many universes” theory is true, where do you think ours falls on the continuum of greatness? Like I get that having a hospitable planet and intelligent life in itself would probably land us in the top quartile, and since there are any trillions of universes where humans just said nahhh to agriculture, we’re pretty darn lucky to even have cereal instead of Mutton Munchies by the hunted and gathered bowlful.
But is it wrong to long for a vacation to one of those slightly rosier neighboring timelines? You know, one where I don’t have the “cilantro tastes like soap” gene? Or the one where I actually am the omnipotent cereal deity old people in the comments section tend to think I am (NO I STILL CAN’T FIX ALPHA-BITS)?
Heck, I’d even settle for a very small ask: A world where Honey ‘N Oats Cheerios Oat Crunch is Honey Nut Cheerios. Like, the latter never existed. That’s how good this Oat Crunch is. At that point I wouldn’t need cilantro or soap!
