(I cropped this one tall solely so you could see Benny’s head)
Do not read this review in the Alps.
Do not read this review while hunting or fishing.
And certainly do not read this review with any sleeping children in the house, because the seismic sigh I’m about to release could make avalanches, ripples, and crybaby dribbles:
*SIGH*
There, that feels better. Hopefully your pets haven’t been spooked and you weren’t in range of my sugar corn-scented breath—that stuff’s Gru-some. Heh, see what I did there? Just a little Despicable humor from Me.
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Please laugh with me. I need something positive to come out of this review. I’m going to keep it quick, because Minions Vanilla Vibe is just an awful, terrible cereal. And no, I’m not saying that in the classic dad joke sense of “oh, these taste horrible! I’ll get rid of ’em for you.” No, Minions Vanilla Vibe cereal—pardon my crudeness here—sucks. From both a flavorful and ideological point of view. Allow me to (briefly) elaborate: Continue reading →
Woof, it took me a while to unscramble my brain before starting this post—just looking at a Lucky Charms Soft Baked Bar threw me into a hapless hypnotic sugar trance. It’s not that the things taste bad; they’re actually addictive little blondies, so simply appealing that after getting halfway through their initial, Costco-exclusive 40-count box release, I simply couldn’t see right. A punch-drunk man-sized Dough Boy, I waddled and swayed around the house scaring my cats like a kaiju. After giving the rest away, I vowed to never touch a Lucky Charms Soft Baked Bar again—especially not the one I found flattened into a wrapping-fused pancake at the bottom of my backpack.
That said, now that Lucky Charms’ doughy delights are available in far-more-reasonable 6-bar boxes, I recommend everyone keep an eye out for them on their next grocery trip. The unpretentious pleasantness of these Lucky Charms treats also bodes well for General Mills’ companion release: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Soft Baked Bars, which are entirely new and could very likely outshine their marshmallowy cousins.
These CTC bars, however, shouldn’t be confused with Cinnamon Toast Crunch Soft Filled Bars, a frozen product released alongside a Cocoa Puffs version, both consisting of oven-ready soft breads with neufchâtel cheese inside. Tragically, those particularly tempting desserts ended up being wholesale only, meaning the only ones who can enjoy them are elementary school cafeteria-goers and the freelance kindergarten cop I hired to smuggle me out a crate of ’em. He never came back.
Instead, I’m sure Soft Baked Cinnamon Toast Crunch Bars will be less cheesy, but far easier to tear open at a moment’s notice for a quick hit of swirling cinna-sugar goodness. If you manage to find them before I do, let me know what you think in the comments below!
Lucky Charms is a cultural treasure of a cereal. So much so that I’d wager over 2/3 of TV jokes about cereal somehow involve technicolor marshmallows. But while the one-note marbits are Lucky Charms’ Wonder Bread and butter, the oat bits that complement every ‘mallow are just as foundationally important to the overall integrity of this cereal we love so much. After all, what is a burst of dreamy sugar without a little grainy realism to bring your orbiting taste buds back down to earthiness?
Contrary to what major breakfast manufacturers seem to believe (for no doubt cost-saving reasons), a cereal’s base grain choice is critical. This can make or break an entire product, depending upon how any given mixture of corn, oat, wheat or rice flours are forged into a certain shape and are given a certain flavor. And while corn definitely has its place in the cereal aisle, it works best when the cereal itself is a celebration of corn. Corn Pops? It sure does. Corn Bran? Why corn’t it? Oh, and Frosted Flakes (of Corn)? I’d expect them to be of nothing less.
But when corn is merely a cereal’s airy and craggy stage, instead of a lead actor, any nuanced flavor basted upon it has to fight for tasteful dominance against its own brazen, maize’n terrain—like sunflower rows growing from concrete. That’s Honey Lucky Charms’ mortal sin: just like Chocolate Lucky Charms and the especially mediocre Fruity Lucky Charms, oat is swapped for corn and then given a flavor, flavors that need oat’s grounding hug more than ever.
But there’s a bit more to this cereal than my rambling intro would have you believe: I’m gonna temper my corn vendetta for a moment and jump right to the honey shot: Continue reading →
It’s 2020, and as if you didn’t already have enough to worry about, we’re about to see the most pointless cereal war of the century come to a head: yes, I’m talking about The Great Fun–Dunk Dispute.
Bad vanilla and birthday cake cereals aren’t uncommon—in fact, I feel like I have to mention the burgeoning blight of them in every other blog post at this point. But with the recent announcement of Funfetti Cereal, things have gotten…confusing. See, many traditionally associate Pillsbury and its giggle-some Dough Boy with General Mills, who do indeed manufacture many of the brand’s most familiar products, like cinnamon roll tubes and those shaped holiday cookies. But when General Mills first acquired Pillsbury, anti-trust laws required that they sell off the rights to Pillsbury dry goods—rights that have since been secured by Hometown Foods, makers of other peripheral grocery store mainstays like Sunny D and Hungry Jack.
So Hometown Foods—who, to my knowledge, has never made a cereal, a fact made more complex when you remember that General Mills did make a Pillsbury Cinnamon Roll Fillows Cereal—is making Funfetti Cereal, potentially with the help of Post, who also made a very similar looking cereal for Tim Hortons. I know this because I was (somewhat curtly) told so by a General Mills representative when inquiring over email.
But now that Dunkaroos are back, and acting as a banner nostalgic reboot for General Mills, it only makes sense for it to be turned into a cereal inspired by the iconic cookies & frosting duo, right? Or could it be that General Mills’ upcoming Dunkaroos Cereal is a direct clapback to Hometown Foods for weaving sugary layers of uncertain breakfast brand ownership?
Maybe it’s both, but what matters is that, according to Cereal Life on Instagram—who appears to have a very close and very trustworthy contact in General Mills’ cereal production wing—Dunkaroos Cereal is coming soon. While this is labeled as a rumor here, we can pretty confidently say this stuff will hit shelves, probably just with different box art—hopefully box art that brings back Duncan the Kangaroo, who has a history of obscurely interacting with cereal mascots.
Just as Hometown Foods’ Funfetti Cereal strongly resembles Timbits Cereal, so too does this first look at Dunkaroos Cereal call to mind General Mills’ Holiday Sprinkles Cookie Crisp. And as someone who has long begrudged that stuff’s existence despite its mediocre presentation alongside the vastly superior Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch, I sure hope Dunkaroos Cereal can bring a whole lot more authentically iced flavor to the breakfast table. Because if it doesn’t, it’ll just be another forgotten facet on the faceless, tastelessly saccharine mass that is vanilla cereal’s past.
Have you ever eaten a bag of Chex Mix and thought—boy, I wonder which of these pieces would kick the most ass. Well wonder no more, because Fred Chexter of Chex Quest fame is back, and he’s brought a ragtag crew of starchy squadmates with him.
For fans of this blog, Chex Quest needs no introduction. I’ve already written multiplearticles on the game and how my childhood fondness for it set off a chain reaction culminating in my site’s immaculate conception from the Milky Way’s milkiest æther. If you need a quick refresher on how we got to this point, allow me to brief—I don’t want my current play session to get soggy.
In 1996, General Mills contracted a small game studio, Digital Café, to design a CD-ROM to be packaged in cereal boxes. Working on a tight timeframe, they ended up doing a full, family-friendly DOOM conversion about a snotty Flemoid alien invasion of a breakfast star system. The hero, Fred Chexter, uses Zorch technology to send the lil boogers back to their home dimension. Continue reading →
It is a time of indoor inertia and slow-digesting creativity. General Grievous’ great-grand-droid-child Mills has assumed his ancestral rank and inherited a diabolical plot: to pump the galaxy full of cloned cash-grab cereals offering little flavor and even less timely appeal. His defenses only loosely fortified with intergalactic vitamins and minerals, it’s up to White Squadron to douse Mills’ plans before it’s too late. But the General has come prepared, for he’s surrounded himself with a belt of razor-sharp corn asteroids, which even sogginess can’t make much worse….
Let’s be honest: Star Wars cereals haven’t been good for a while. Not since the days of C3POs, a double-hooped cereal that was later charmingly reborn as Winnie the Pooh’s Hunny B’s, have we seen the omnipresent series done crunchy justice beyond the tried-and-truly boring formula of corn pieces and marshmallows. While I love marbit cereals as much as the next Rodian, to take the graces of Lucky Charms and neuter the oat component is a tragedy most unwise.
Baby Yoda Cereal is the latest example. While I’ll throttle my own personal opinion on the itty-bitty alien muppet itself—I’ve kind of fallen off the Star Wars train since around the time in the early ’00s that my parents wouldn’t upgrade our dial-up internet solely so I could play Star Wars Galaxies—I can’t say I’m excited about Baby Yoda’s cereal. Since The Mandalorian Season 2 doesn’t drop until October, it feels strangely timed. Plus, it doesn’t even appear to have the fruity flavor of its General Mills predecessors. But since that fruit flavor was also chemically cringeworthy, maybe comparative corny blandness isn’t such a bad thing.
Whether this is the cereal you’re looking for or not, expect it in stores this summer.
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 →
I’ve written about a lot of battered & baked cereals in my time, but this one takes the confetti cake.
Coming soon from Pillsbury, Funfetti Cereal promises to be ‘the fun and only’ birthday/vanilla/angel food cake cereal you’ll ever need. Just how it will be “bursting with fun” remains unclear, but as Funfetti Cereal’s release trails a full Chuck E. Cheese itinerary’s worth of birthdaycakeflavoredbreakfastproducts, these sprinkled spheres are going to have to work really, flavorfully hard to avoid being just another boring, exponentially sugared cereal.
I’ll admit, I’m a bit over vanilla and birthday cake in the breakfast aisle, because its typical one-note sweetness feels like a cheap cop-out to avoid paying for richer, more imaginative flavors, but hey: at least Funfetti looks pretty (pretti?).
What’s especially strange here is that General Mills is not producing this cereal, despite Pillsbury being their subsidiary brand. This tip comes from longtime friend Gabe Fonseca, who suspects Post might be producing the product, as they were the ghost writers behind the similar-looking Canada exclusive Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal.
Though it already appears on Walmart’s site, Funfetti Cereal’s release date is as of yet unknown. Hopefully Pillsbury & their mysterious co. take their time with this one, because unlike a real gooey cake, a half-baked cake cereal is like a trick candle: it blows, and never grants our wishes.
