Tag Archives: holiday

Review: Trader Joe’s Hot Cocoa O’s

Joe, Joe, Joe! Merry Christmas!

I know, I know, it’s crazy: even after a devilishly creative line like that, Trader Joe’s corporate still won’t hire me to write their Fearless Flyer. Well buckle, up, Josè, Joey, and Joseph, because your nativity-era copywriting ain’t getting any better than that!

In fact, I ‘d like to try writing a Fearless Flyer entry for the store’s newest cereal, Trader Joe’s Hot Cocoa O’s, before diving into the review. Let me just clear my keyboard—*ahem*:

It’s all fun and reindeer games until someone skips breakfast. So click-click-click on over to the cereal aisle to kick-kick-kick-off a merry day of snowball fighting and cookie dough munching in true winter style, as we turned a classic Yuletide flavor into a box of ho ho hoops and marshmallows. It narrowly beat out our second idea: Fruitcake-Frosted Coal Flakes.

Not bad, eh? Hopefully we can say the same for the cereal. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 4 rating, chocolate, holiday, trader joe's. 8 Comments

Dec. ’17

Review: Quaker Gingerbread Spice Oatmeal

By this point, my obsession with gingerbread is well documented on this site—and probably by the Library of Congress, too.

So I’m not going to start this review of Quaker’s new Gingerbread Oatmeal (just one arm of their 2017 gingerbread menagerie, which also includes a cereal) by clobbering you over the head with my love for cloves, ginger, and molasses-y dough. Instead, I’ll segue in by briefly obsessing over my other favorite winter flavor: eggnog. In short…it’s great!

This delightfully spiced custardy concoction is coziness distilled, and now that my bucket list is one gingerbread cereal shorter, my new “dream cereal” has to be an eggnog one—preferably of the Toast Crunch variety—if only so that I can pour eggnog on my crunchy eggnog cereal and feel as giddy as a kid watching a G.I. Christmas Special on a Saturday morning Christmas Eve.

Or maybe that’ll just be the rum talking. Whatever: oatmeal time! Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, gingerbread, holiday, oatmeal, quaker. 5 Comments

Nov. ’17

Review: belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits

Gingerbread can do things to a man. Powerful things.

Its pillowy cookie coziness can make him devour a whole plates worth of gingerbread men with all the empathy of a bloodthirsty Xenomorph.
Its darkling molasses sweetness can make him suckle a used cookie cutter like a hungry baby’s favorite pacifier.
Its intricate blend of holiday spices can make him seriously grill a Home Depot employee for a price quote on building an actual gingerbread villa in the countryside—or at least a gingerbread armoire to hold all his Shrek DVDs.

Worst of all, gingerbread can make that cereal blogger scour the aisles of his local supermarket for any kind of gingery breakfast product—be it a cereal, oatmeal, or granola bar—he can write about. Even a breakfast biscuit—the kind that he, after triumphantly trafficking it like a footballer through the store’s pre-Thanksgiving, stuffing-clutching crowd, now munches on—would suffice.

So here he sits a-munching, transfixed by gingerfever. Is this him speaking to you, or the gingerbread? He thinks you should bow to your new gingerbread ov—

Oh hey guys, didn’t see you come in. That was weird—I just had a quick power nap, and now there’s an open package of belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits in front of me. Oh well, might as well give ’em a try, right? Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 5 rating, gingerbread, holiday, non cereal. 1 Comment

Nov. ’17

Spooned & Spotted: Trader Joe’s Hot Cocoa O’s Cereal

Fight. Fight. Snowball fight!

I know I shouldn’t incite polar breakfast violence, but it just seems a little too convenient that, right after Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs broke the ice as the first-ever hot chocolate-flavored cereal, Trader Joe’s hops into the (powdered) mix with a Hot Cocoa O’s Cereal of his own.

So now there’s bound to be a munchy melee between these two well-known cereal champions:

In this corner, we have Sonny and his marshmallow puck-studded Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs! Though they may just taste like more sugary Cocoa Puffs, these cozy–crunchy orbs contain great power—and decades of cuckoo cereal clout!

Aaaaand in this corner, we have Trader Joseph and his (hopefully dark) chocolate dark horses! Though Smokin’ Joe the Trader isn’t renowned for his cereal—his Raisin Bran Clusters are perhaps his only belt-bursting championship belt-winner to date—Hot Cocoa O’s look like holiday Oreo O’s, and that alone is enough to sell more tickets than a Bob Dylan–Katy Perry tag team at Summer Slam!

Yes, I look forward to reviewing this hot chocolate cereal as soon as I find it—hopefully right next to the almond ‘nog so I can drown my early-sunset-imposed sorrows right along with my marshmallowy chocolate hoops.

Thanks to @OUATreviewed on Twitter for coming through with the find. If you have a merry cereal snapshot of your own to share, ship it via email or Polar Express on our Submissions page!

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Specials. Tags: chocolate, holiday, spooned & spotted, trader joe's. 1 Comment

Nov. ’17

Review: Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs Cereal

Some things just make sense together. Like peanut butter and chocolate. Or peanut butter and jelly. Or peanut butter and bananas. Or peanut butter and analogies about things that go well together.

Oh, and chocolate and marshmallows, I guess.

That’s why it makes no sense that it took ’til 2017 for General Mills to realize just how many cents they’d make by putting mini marshmallows in Cocoa Puffs. From the humble Mallo Cup to being 2/3 of the iconic s’more, chocolate and marshmallows have a long history of delightfully gumming up people’s teeth.

But hot cocoa/hot chocolate (I refuse to take a stance on which name is better. As I’ve said before, I’m staying as neutral as a packet of Swiss Miss) is perhaps the most memorably cozy pairing of the two. Therefore, the only explanation for why this took so long is that Sonny always flies south for the winter. I’m willing to forgive him for going AWOL for Cocoa Puffs, so long as his redundantly named Hot Cocoa Cocoa Puffs are good. Since my childhood self used to think hot cocoa was made by microwaving chocolate milk, the bar is pretty low.

I still have nightmares about tepid, radiated and pasteurized dairy products.

Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 8 rating, chocolate, cocoa puffs, general mills, holiday. 2 Comments

Nov. ’17

Holiday Review: Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms Cereal

Halloween: over.
Jack-O-Lanterns: Decomp-O-sed.
Skeletons: stuffed back inside their human shells, where they belong.

Yes, now that October’s climactic ‘ween has waned, I’m slowly waxing into full Christmas mode (it’s easy to wax when you have so much 50% off candy corn left over). I know what you all you turkeys are thinking: but what about Thanksgiving? And I say to you two things. One, since Thanksgiving is objectively the chillest holiday, I don’t think it would give a rat’s mashed potato if we used it as a one-day, turkey-steeped nap in the middle of two months’ worth of Christmas mania.

And two: you show me a Thanksgiving cereal I can write about instead, and I’ll gladly dive headfirst into that bowl of Green Bean Casserole Toast Crunch.

So yes, I’m starting the holidays early with my review of Cinnamon Vanilla Lucky Charms, one of two new wintery treats from General Mills. As for Thanksgiving, I’ll just leave out some stuffing and a glass of cranberry sauce for Tryptophanta Claus. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 6 rating, general mills, holiday, lucky charms. 2 Comments

Oct. ’17

Review: Quaker Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal

October 14th, 2017: the day Dan finally shut up about wanting a gingerbread cereal.

Yes, this is a landmark day—literally: the spot where I excitedly stamped my feet upon tasting Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal is now craterous enough to be deemed a geologic point of interest. I’ve begged for a gingerbread cereal (Gingerbread Toast Crunch, to be more specific, but gingerbeggars can’t be choosers) since the first year I had enough teeth to eat both a gingerbread man and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And after decades of disappointment, that stoically grinning Quaker Oats guy must have finally felt my annoying laments reverberate through his 2-dimensional cardboard plane, because we now have Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal: America’s first ever gingerbread breakfast cereal.

I told myself I’d wait ’til winter months to review this stuff, since i have so many autumn treats to write about, but pumpkin spice and caramel apple be damned: if I don’t give my inner child this one, he’s going to beat my internal organs with a whiffle ball bat and a pair of Sock’em Boppers. Continue reading →

Posted by dan g.. Categories: Reviews. Tags: 7 rating, gingerbread, holiday, life, quaker. 8 Comments

Sep. ’17

News: Gingerbread Spice Life Cereal is Coming Soon!

Gingerbread Life Cereal – Quaker Spiced Multigrain Box

(Image via Quaker)

DAYS SINCE LIFE-CHANGING CEREAL INCIDENT: 0

It’s been a while since I had to change that sign, but this news seals it. Limited Edition Gingerbread Spice Life Multigrain Cereal is coming this holiday season, which, seeing how people prepare for winter celebration, means a box of Gingerbread Life it should have been in my pantry two weeks ago, sandwiched between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cinnamon Frosted Flakes to make a crunchy speculoos sandwich.

Speaking of which, I have a history with gingerbread cereal—or at least with fanatically wanting it. A search on my site reveals how big of a gingerbread fanman I am, and I’ve always thought that Cinnamon Toast Crunch would adopt the flavor first (if anyone ever did), due to their reputation for holiday cereals tasty enough to open your third eye and hang mistletoe from the lashes.

Life Cereal was one of the last brands I’d expect to release a naturally flavored gingerbread cereal—right alongside Crispix, Froot Loops, and Fiber One—but seeing how well they spiced Pumpkin Spice Life, I’m willing to give old man Quaker the benefit of the doubt. Seriously: the only thing on the line is the crushingly weighty anticipation built up slowly over decades of my life. That’s it. No pressure.

While I wait for Gingerbread Spice Life to hit shelves, I think I need to add something new to my cereal bucket list. Almost all my dream flavors have now existed as cereals: maple, PB&J, and now gingerbread. I’ll just have to pick something so obscure and impossible that it’ll never happen and I can wistfully dream about it forever.

Zucchini Bread Toast Crunch, anyone?

Posted by dan g.. Categories: News. Tags: holiday, life, news, quaker. 8 Comments