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 →
Just as every bootleg Chuck E. Cheese birthday party—what, you’ve never been to Buck G. Brie?—is bound to be punctuated by a cake so paradoxically full of empty sweetness and frosted typos, so too is a Pop-Tarts gala destined for the apex of adequacy.
Following three successful Pop-Tarts Bites launches that run a rich flavor gamut of Strawberry, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and Chocolatey Fudge, Kellogg’s is commemorating the occasion not with a fan-favorite taste like S’Mores or Wild Berry, but with…Confetti Cake. As a former grocery store bakery worker, let me earnestly say this:
What a load of sheet.
Look, I’m not saying Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites will be bad, but if recent caked-on breakfast products areanyindication, this is just an excuse to dump sugar, vanilla and maybe buttercream into a churning cauldron and call it a day.
Even more perplexing are the naming conventions within the Pop-Tarts Bites sub-brand. Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts became Chocolatey Fudge Bites, and now Confetti Cupcake Pop-Tarts are simply Confetti Cake Bites. Is this an accidental oversight, or am I meant to believe that these teeny pastries contain more concerted cake flavor than a Tart five times their size?
Either way, we’ll find out soon when Confetti Cake Pop-Tarts Bites drop and I end up eating them by the cupful.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards breakfast to be born?
Seriously: if you showed me the above product 30 years ago, my dad would be putting a fist in your soon-to-be-twinkling eye. But seriously Cerealously: I’ve become so accustomed to the notion of Pop-Tarts as a cereal that I hardly stopped to consider the infinite opportunity within its inverse.
Now, Froot Loops probably wouldn’t be my first choice for a co-branded Kellogg’s Crunch-Tart. I would’ve picked Raisin Bran or Cocoa Krispies, if only so they could be called Snap, Crackle Pop-Tarts. But nevertheless, this sort of fusion you’d think would be forbidden by church and state alike has come to my bruncheon nook
Churning and churning in my widening stomach The Toucan cannot hear the toaster; Crust falls apart, the filling cannot hold; Iced anarchy is Looped upon my bowl.Continue reading →
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.
Anybody else got weird, yet oh-so-satisfying ways to eat food? And I don’t mean any particular combination of foods—though I will proudly die on the Pringles with Ketchup Hill, as it’s where my family plot will be.
No, I’m talking unconventional approaches to the physical act of eating something. Sure, there are classics, like unscrewing and licking an Oreo clean or consuming Snickers with a fork & knife. And there are more disturbing ones, like those who eat kiwis with the fuzzy flesh on, or the worryingly confident breed of Fun Dip consumer who eats the sticks totally unadorned.
Personally, I like to eat completely around the cookie part of a Twix to save it for last, consume a handful of popcorn like an apple, and more-than-occasionally swallow pasta noodles whole for the unique tracheal imprint left by each respective shape. Oh, and I used to unknowingly eat Reese’s Cups with the paper still on until an embarrassingly mature age.
Pop-Tarts are far from immune from this sort of nuanced noshing. While my formerly frowned-upon habit of freezing toaster pastries has now been largely normalized (you’re welcome), I still know many who will nibble around the crust before handling the sweet meat of the matter. This may be less barbaric (albeit less creative) than eating the insides before the crust, but either way these folks are depriving themselves of the blessed balance struck at the baked-in slip fault between frosting and crisped crust.
No, now that I’ve eaten Chocolatey Fudge Pop-Tarts Bites, I believe there is a better way: one that may be difficult to scale up to a regular Pop-Tart, but which ought to nevertheless cleave your breakfast time traditions in twain. Continue reading →
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?
Fact: Chocolate Fudge Pop-Tarts are inherently the most nostalgic to me.
Are they my favorites today? Not a chance. But they were the only ones my parents ever got, and the memories of eating them with my sister are unparalleled in their neurologic detail. In fact, it’s because of my mortal youthful sin of microwaving my Pop-Tarts for 15 seconds to cook them that today I feel a phantom guilt hugging my soul so tightly that I’ve become an ardent crusader for the true method of Pop-Tart preparation: freezing.
Such a technique likewise works wonders on Pop-Tarts Bites, which debuted right around this time last year in Brown Sugar Cinnamon and Strawberry. By bringing a thicker crust and more permeating frosted sweetness to portable breakfasts everywhere, these Bites are worthy successors of Pop-Tarts Mini Crisps and Go-Tarts.
So while it was such a no-brainer to bring chocolate into the mix—even if it took 365 days of face-palming obviousness—and while I have no-doubt these will be tasty enough to take permanent residence in my car’s glove box, I again hope Chocolate Fudge isn’t the Rise of Skywalker to an ending Bites-sized trilogy. If we’re gonna milk this pastry franchise for what it’s worth, I want Cookies & Creme, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and Wild Berry too—it’d practically be this series’ Baby Yoda!
Alright, who’s in charge of Kellogg’s Adjectival Development Department? I just want to talk.
“Blueberrific” Pop-Tarts Crisps presented a pretty mild misdemeanor of negligent neologizing. But “Mer-Mazing”? That’s a high crime right up there with first-degree mer-der. I mean, I get it: Kellogg’s still had enough of the old Blue Raspberry Pop-Tart filling lying around—I have to imagine this stuff must radioactively decay at the rate of Chernobyl—and wanted to tie into the far-from-floundering mermaid trend. But would it’ve killed them to switch cryptids and debut wordplay so bad it’s good?
Bluepacabra Raspberry just rolls off the severed goat tongue!
In any case, The Tasty Turtle on Instagram is the first to spot these sea-dame snacks at Walmart. Big ups to them for sharing, but I will say this box art leaves me with more questions than answers. Like, why is this blue mermaid incapable of articulately holding a Pop-Tart? How can a Pop-Tart even survive underwater?
And is there another fishy lower body behind that giant Tart, or are we to believe this is a Mer-pastry, who’s sunk eternally to the bottom of the ocean for lack of proper hydrodynamics? The secrets of the deep will forever elude me.
