Well, they finally did it. After years of exclusive sweepstakes and crass imitations, Lucky Charms is offering anyone the chance to buy a 6oz pouch of ALL MARSHMALLOWS.
First reported by Saturday Morning Nostalgia and spotted at both Food City and Walmart, Lucky Charms Just Magical Marshmallows feels like a product that should have naturally came out decades ago. Granted, five-pound bags of generic cereal marshmallows have been just a Google search away for years now, but there’s something climactic about finally being able to buy the premium, name brand stuff.
Now what exactly do you do with so many rainbow-hued sugar nuggets? Well that’s up to your imagination. Microwave them together into a s’more-ready puck. Bake them into cookies. Or just make a bowl of Uh-Oh! Lucky Charms with just a few oat pieces scattered about. The world is your purple horseshoe!
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 →
If you’ve ever wanted enough sugary balloons for an amateur performance of Up starring Nena and Pennywise, then boy do General Mills and Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals have something that’ll float your sewer-in-the-sky-bound houseboat.
Exclusive to Costco (in, of course, twin-packed 1-pound boxes), Lucky Charms with only red and yellow balloon marshmallows are the latest collaboration between General Mills and the non-profit fundraising group for children’s hospitals, which does a lot of miraculous co-branding work in the month of May. This isn’t the firsttime Lucky Charms has debuted a variant with single marbit-focused color variants, but I don’t think the balloon marshmallow in particular has ever been given such a spotlight. Either way, the yellow balloons could easily double as lightbulbs for diorama re-creations of the Homestar Runner eating an incandescent sandwich.
Our thanks to Gabe Fonseca of Cereal Time for the tip. If you happen to spot a new cereal or breakfast product—of the many-hued marbit variety or otherwise—you can send them over at our Submissions page, or tweet them @cerealouslynet.
I’m putting on my waffle cone chainmail and wielding a shield forged from molten maraschino cherries, because what I’m about to say will no-doubt spark a meltdown in the frozen brains of whole-blooded ice cream diehards everywhere:
I like light ice cream.
Yes, I know it has a lot less authentic milk fat, and I know there’s a certain broad threshold between light ice cream and ‘frozen desserts’ that further muddles the clarity of creamishness involved. But I’m also a grown baby with sensitive teeth and a mild lactose problem, so something soft and tolerably intolerable is a lot more appealing than a brick of pasteurized pain in my gut.
I like to think that Edy’s/Dreyer’s made this pair of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms ice creams light solely so I, their favorite cereal reviewer, could safely discuss them. I know, in reality, that it was a matter of cost, but hey: let me have this fantasy as I go scoop deep into churned versions of General Mills’ two most spun-off cereals. Continue reading →
After enduring enough reality-deforming Herculean labors to leave a Hydra’s heads spinning, you’ve finally got your calloused mitts on Lucky the Leprechaun’s pot of gold! With great care, you hoist it—boy this thing’s heavy—out of whatever hidey-ho—oh no.
It was full of honey.
And now you’re slathered in it.
And said hidey-hole is starting to look and sound like a hibernation hole.
I mean, can you blame Lucky for going to such carnivorous lengths to hide his new Lucky Charms with Honey Clovers cereal? News of this apian addition to the Charms family was leaked—slowly and viscously—by Cereal Life on Instagram (thanks for sharing!). While the very suggestion of uniting Lucky Charms with Honey Nut Cheerios is exciting, what’s really got me confident about this stuff’s quality is a single word on the above box.
No, not honey itself, but oat.
Whereas the likes of Chocolate & Fruity Lucky Charms were inexplicably defiled with a corn flour base, Honey Lucky Charms appears to keep with the cereal’s most based base grain. With that in mind, I’d happily endure a hundred stings to get my paws on a box of this stuff early. But until then, I guess I’ll just drizzle real honey on my leftover St. Paddy’s Day Charms.
It’s a welcome change from my maple syrup mainstay condiment, after all.
(UPDATED MARCH 2: IHOP is adding frequent Lucky Charms co-collaborator Cinnamon Toast Crunch to their cereal pancake ensemble, and Cap’n Crunch too!)
Finally. Validation.
For too long, I’ve been playfully chided by friends, frenemies and sea anemones alike for my admittedly uncommon habit of drizzling maple syrup on just about every cereal out there—just to see if it’s good! And it almost always is! But now? IHOP is giving me implicit permission to go full hog on a stack of cereal pancakes, amber lagoon and all.
What’s that? There’s no mention of syrup in this ad for IHOP’s new Cereal Pancakes? Well, there’s (strangely) no explicit brand mention of Lucky Charms either, so forgive me for wanting what is already no-doubt a brain-buzzer of sugary madness to slide down my gullet a bit easier.
Sure the Lucky Charms (Fruity Lucky Charms, specifically) pieces are exciting, but what’s got me geeked here is the “CREAMY CEREAL MILK MOUSSE” drizzled about with ersatz artistry. No clue exactly what it’ll taste like, but if I’m already taking creative liberties with these panned cakes, I might as well scrape off all the mousse, replace it with syrup, and take it home to eat with a bowl of Eggo Cereal.
Because no disrespect to IHOP, but only one ounce of awesomeness? I can do better. Continue reading →
Ever wonder what one of those iridescent parking lot oil slicks would taste like? Well now you won’t have to risk braincells nor brawn to find out, because once these Lucky Charms marshmallows melt into your Swiss Miss Hot Cocoa, I have to imagine the resulting soup will call to mind muddy puddles, dirt pies, and watercolor mixers.
But will Swiss Miss with Lucky Charms Marshmallows still taste good? Almost certainly, because there’s really nothing Lucky Charms branded marshmallows will add to this Nesquikish stew that mini marshmallows haven’t already been doing for centuries.
Nevertheless, expect these hot mixes to hit shelves any day now—if nothing else, I can guarantee they’ll taste better than the kind of cocoa my kid self made by microwaving chocolate milk.
