Long dubbed the ice cream of the future, Dippin’ Dots’ (I’m gonna need to order another box of apostrophes) famous evolution was both the atomization and flesh-ripping frostification of the classically amorphous dairy treat using dry ice.
Since there’s already been cereal with freeze dried ice cream bits, any truly revolutionary cereal will have to up the ante from there.
Micro-chipped cereal for GPS-powered “Breakfast Go” mobile games? Zero calorie Diet Cereal (or at least translucent Crystal Cereal?)?
Ooh, or maybe a 100% All Beef Hot Dog Cereal…you know…to compete with Dippin’ Dots’ at the ball game?
Regardless, General Mills’ new Dippin’ Dots Cereal is here, to the delight of many and the frustration of one, and I’m going to see if it’s as innovative as its namesake by first trying the flavor that fits with this week’s theme of bananamadness: Banana Split!
(If I die of a potassium overdose, blame whichever Banana in Pyjamas has a higher net worth.)
You know, chaos scoops: when you grab a big handful of a mixed foodstuffs with blatant disregard for flavor sorting or portion control, slam it in your mouth with the grace of a Legends of the Hidden Temple contestant putting the Silver Monkey together, and relish in a lawless hodgepodge of melded flavors.
Trail mix is good about this (as long as you maintain a respectable nuts-to-M&M’s ratio), Skittles scoops are hedonistically sweet, and jelly beans are the definition of risk vs. reward—you get one black licorice or cinnamon in there and it’s a whammy for your digestive system.
That’s why I was curious about Special K’s new Berries & Peaches cereal, the third in their probiotic line of Nourishcereals (I hear if you eat them while taking an antibiotic, your gut flora unites to punch you in the colon). With so many ingredients—flakes, dried strawberries/blueberries/peaches, and yogurty bits, could Special K possibly pull such complex choreography? Or would it taste like a fire in my (Jelly) Belly?
Well it’s time to make a sacrifice for the people. If I start posting pro-bacteria propaganda next week, know that I’ve been compromised. Continue reading →
For those about to rock read my third annual review of the exact same cereal, we salute you!
Listen, Frank. Can I call you Frankie? Francis? Franco-Prussian War?
You know I love you, man. It’s true, it’s true: I tell people I love the taste of Count Chocula the best—not counting my estranged (emphasis on the strange) love, Fruity Yummy Mummy, who’s currently jamming to “Walk Like an Egyptian” in some funky undead pyramid disco in the sky.
But from an aesthetic standpoint, I like you best. I promise. No I don’t mean you, you. Let’s be real here: Boo Berry is both suaver and cuter in his debonair porkpie hat. I’d let him take me to the Poltergeist Prom any day. No way my father would let me get picked up by a pink dude with steampunk apparatuses on his neck. We live in the clean energy age, Francesco.
But your cereal? Those neon pink ghosts and pastel marshmallows? The pastel marshmallows that make the whole thing feel like a Taiwanese night market? Hoo, doggy! Or should I say, A-WOO, werewolfy!
François, your artificially strawberry-flavored cereal is the prettiest I’ve ever seen. I’d hang it on my refrigerator if it contained enough magnesium per serving (I don’t understand how magnets work). But for now, I have to eat it. So let’s forget about the Count, forget that I just swooned so hard over Boo Berry that I crashed through your coffee table, and let’s have Franken Berry for breakfast. Continue reading →
Well, well, well: here we are again, Shredded Wheat.
My first experience with one of Shredded Wheat’s new trilogy of flavors, which not-so-subtly tries top compete with Frosted Mini-Wheats by, well, frosting the brand’s iconic miniature wheat biscuits and stuffing (allegedly) flavorful stuff inside, was cosmically bland. I swore I wouldn’t try another flavor. I started smashing all square and/or thatched things in my apparent. I even told people I was allergic to wheat—just the sight of it, not the taste.
But after being coerced by a trusted source to give this Mixed Berry variety a try, and after (unsurprisingly) failing to find Count Chocula when it’s still hot enough out to boil swimming pools into holy water, I find myself staring at a bowlful of vaguely mauve biscuits.
Alright, Shredded Wheat. Let’s do this. Just don’t forget: bore me once, shame on you. Bore me twice, I’m going to start crank-calling the National Wheat Foundation out of juvenile spite. Continue reading →
Neapolitan ice cream is criminally underrated. I mean, it combines the three most popular ice cream flavors (though I still can’t fathom how plain ol’ vanilla is more popular than Chocozuma’s Revenge, Chocolardiac Arrest, or any of those other “X-Treme Ice Creamz”) into one—sometimes even in snowman form—and we still hardly see it appear in things other than ice cream. Heck, even Naples itself has a flag that looks more like Superman ice cream than neapolitan’s iconic pink, brown, and creme.
And before these new neapolitan Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops, there has been only one other neapolitan cereal—and it was only released in New Zealand. I guess America will have to make the first kiwi cereal as revenge.
But enough melty melancholia. Let’s see if these strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate Cocoa Puffs are good enough to turn my local Baskin-Robbins’ 31 flavors into 401k. Continue reading →
It turns out reports of Tiny Toast’s death have not been greatly exaggerated. The brand of crunchy, strawberry and blueberry-flavored mini-loaves has been officially absorbed into the Toast Crunch family of cereals, as General Mills and many suddenly cereal-happy media outlets (after the Oreo O’s news, no one’s sleeping on everyone’s favorite wake-up foodstuff anymore) are now reporting.
I took to Twitter this morning to succinctly share my thoughts on this change, and I thought I’d reproduce my retrospection here, since copying and pasting tweets is the only way to keep me from writing 1,000+ more unnecessarily sappy words about pygmy bread pieces. Continue reading →
Drink it in, folks: Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops, the first (American*) neapolitan cereal, is here.
Err, perhaps “drink it in” isn’t fitting enough. “Lick it in”? “Cone it in”? “Do everything but bite it in because you have sensitive teeth and a chronically frozen brain”?
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we can finally taste strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate all in the same cereal bowl without Frankenstein-ing some weird mix of Tiny Toast, Life, and crumbled-up Halloween Pop-Tarts (I know there are many chocolate cereals, but if you’re going to be a mad breakfast scientist, you might as well go borderline bonkers).
Spotted at Jewel-Osco and graciously shared by fellow snack scholar The Junk Food Aisle, Ice Cream Scoops Cocoa Puffs appropriately combine corn puffs bearing the three fruity, beany, and fudgy flavors of neapolitan ice cream. Vanilla and chocolate have crossed paths beneath Sonny’s bill before, but strawberry is a welcome newcomer. It’s so welcome that it makes me forget that last year’s greatest ice cream cereal (and simply greatest cereal), Cap’n Crunch’s Orange Creampop Crunch, has passed on to the great cosmic creamsicle in the sky.
Here’s hoping that if these Cocoa Puffs Ice Cream Scoops work out, we’ll get different frozen novelty flavors in the future. Superman Puffs, anyone?
Thanks again to Junk Food Aisle for sharing the scoop—literally. Got a freshly spotted flavor of your own to dish out? Spoon it over to cerealously.net@gmail.com for a chance to see it on the site.
*There has been a neapolitan cereal before…in New Zealand! As usual, Cereal Time time traveller Gabe Fonseca knows all about it.
Is Tiny Toast…toast? At first glance, that’s what the “debut” of “new” “Strawberry Toast Crunch” and “Blueberry Toast Crunch” would seem to “indicate.”
Whoops, I don’t think I needed those last snarky quotation marks.
Reader Sydney N. kindly sent us the above snapshot from Walmart, which shows the adorably fruit-speckled bread slices we’ve known as Tiny Toast for nearly a year now re-branded under the Toast Crunch family of cereals. Led by the patriarchal Cinnamon Toast Crunch, this crunchy clan also consists of wild child Chocolate Toast Crunch, Canadian uncle French Toast Crunch, deadbeat son who only comes back to mooch on Christmas Cinnamon Star Crunch, (and his long-lost twin brother Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch), as well as a plethora of dead ancestors, from Peanut Butter Toast Crunch to Frosted Toast Crunch, who the family nonchalantly buried in the backyard after they failed to live up to Daddy’s legacy.
♫ Our house, is a very very very morbid house. ♫
Tiny Toast’s relationship to the Toast Crunch kinfolk has always been dubious: the cereals look so much like French Toast Crunch that we never knew if they were related, or if Tiny Toast was just French’s obsessive best friend who weirdly emulates his hero. But now that it’s been established in cereal canon that TT is FTC’s cousin who moved south to warmer, berry-friendly weather and changed his name, I can rest easy at night—and start editing my fan fictions.
That was all a very long-winded segue into my main point about Strawberry and Blueberry Toast Crunches: that it may not mean Tiny Toast’s demise at all. The fresh-faced pair has only been seen at Walmart so far, so it could be a store-exclusive rebrand demo, like Post did with Waffle Crisp and Good Morenings Waffle Crunch. I refuse to make a definite coroner’s call on Tiny Toast until General Mills itself gives the sweet slices a eulogy.
Which is perfectly fine with me, because like my great-granny definitely might have said, “you can have too many cooks in the kitchen, but you can never have too many cute crunchy loaves in the cereal aisle.”
Thanks again for the photo, Sydney! If you’ve got a cool cereal photo of your own to share, spoon it over to cerealously.net@gmail.com for a chance to see it on the site.
