Anyone that knows me in real life, is friends with me on Facebook or follows my Instagram, knows that I love cereal. I like buying new and novelty cereals on top of just eating it regularly just because it’s a great snack. But most recently I’ve gotten in the habit of trying out products that fuse cereal with other things and it’s been the greatest shit because if there’s anything I want, it’s to shove more cereal into my daily routine. I’m not a regular coffee drinker but the Fruity Pebbles coffee creamer stays in my fridge. And now we get into our newest hybrid: General Mills cereal oatmeal flavors. I bought all four flavors so you may or may not have to.
We’ve got Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Trix, and Cocoa Puffs. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even look at ANY details before leaving the store with them. My lady actually saw them first and knew I would be interested so we grabbed them all and I inspected them at home. Here’s my first realization: each flavor isn’t just cereal flavored oatmeal or even just plain oatmeal you add cereal to. No, they did some homework and actually tried their best to emulate their chosen brands. Lucky Charms is vanilla oatmeal that you add marshmallows to, Cocoa Puffs is chocolate flavored oatmeal you add Cocoa Puff-like pieces to, Trix, surprisingly, is “fruit” flavored oatmeal that you add Trix-like pieces to, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch is just cinnamon oatmeal that you add….more cinnamon and sugar to.
Second realization: there’s a pack of toppings for each package of oatmeal so each box has 6 oatmeal packs and 6 packs of toppings. Look...I normally eat 2 packs of oatmeal at a time but I would absolutely NOT add two packs of that fucking topping to my oatmeal at once. I’m too old for that and the sugar rush would cripple me more than the fiber already does. However, for this review, I did make a 1 to 1 of each flavor just to test them out.
So after microwaving each packet, I decided to eat them without the toppings first just to get a feel for what the toppings were going to add and I must say that I’m mostly impressed that they weren’t bland. The most normal of them was the Cinnamon Toast Crunch as it’s honestly just cinnamon sugar oatmeal so if you’ve had it already, you’re not missing much. Lucky Charms vanilla oatmeal was pretty good on its own as well. I don’t think I’ve ever had straight-up vanilla oatmeal before so this was pleasant. The Cocoa Puffs were very close in taste to actual Cocoa Puffs taste which…I think I have to add this here, I’m not really a fan of. While chocolate cereals are great, Cocoa Puffs taste like the flavor it tacked onto a worse cereal. I prefer Cocoa Pebbles each and every time. The oatmeal wasn’t terrible but I can’t see myself getting it outside of this test.
Lastly are the “fruit” flavored Trix oatmeal which...honestly just tastes like Trix. I was impressed to the point that I didn’t understand why they even needed the toppings for it because it was close enough to the cereal flavor as is. This does, however, bring up a constant thought I have when eating these hybrid Frankenfoods. What kind of tinkering of chemicals do you have to do in order to make an unrelated food taste exactly like another one? I feel like the Trix flavored oatmeal possibly used the same alien technology used to make Fruity Pebbles coffee creamer taste exactly like the cereal as well. But I digress, great execution.
From there, I finally added the toppings to each cereal, and here are the individual results.
The Lucky Charms marshmallows added nothing to the flavor except sugar. You know how the best part about eating them is taking the regular pieces and rounding up a couple to get that flavor in? Yeah, no such luck here. I don’t know how but the vanilla oatmeal did the opposite of what the cereal does and just absorbed it! There was also the weird but expected crunch that came with it but...no flavor blast, just more sweetness. Additionally, the longer you leave the marshmallows in, they eventually just turn to mush and you can’t tell they’re in there except by the sight of them which is a decent enough test for color theory. Great idea, bad execution. Other cereals were more deserving of a hybrid.
The Trix pieces (which aren’t really Trix but aren’t really cereal) did make the oatmeal taste more like Trix but also gave it an unnatural crunch like it was stale. Unlike the Lucky Charms marshmallows, they didn’t get absorbed into the oatmeal...for better or worse. Those stale feeling pieces remained the same for as long as I kept the bowl out. So for this one, the oatmeal tasted like Trix, but a stale bowl of them.
Cocoa Puffs, I feel, were possibly the best of the bunch and that’s saying something from someone who isn’t a fan. Similar to the Trix flavor, they made it taste more like the cereal except the crunch of the pieces was more crisp like, well, Cocoa Krispies. They felt light, not too distracting, and a welcome addition to the overall flavor. If you already like Cocoa Puffs, this one is worth trying.
Lastly, we have the Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavor and...what was the point of this? Here’s the thing, it’s not bad per se, but the thing you add to the cinnamon sugar oatmeal is just more cinnamon sugar (oh, I’m sorry, Cinnadust™, which we’ll get into.) The sugar pieces are bigger but it was absorbed all the same. I would’ve preferred actual cereal pieces like the others to at least give me a crunch. But nnnnnNNNooooooOOOOooo....just another generic CTC pairing, almost as far removed as their coffee creamer. (Cinnamon Toast Crunch creamer is not only disgusting, it doesn’t taste like the cereal, AND doesn’t even have cinnamon as an ingredient!) So on this one, I had to bring out some assistance.
Meet Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust™ flavoring, found in the spice aisle. I actually got this stuff before the oatmeal and wanted an opportunity to use it so what better chance than to enhance the oatmeal that shares its namesake? Two things here; the dust is finer than the stuff included in the packaging so obviously Cinnadust™ isn’t consistent, and...it’s just more cinnamon sugar. Nothing to see here. It changed nothing.
So what have we learned here? The Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavors have no relation to their respective cereals, the Trix pieces are stale, and Cocoa Puffs aren’t bad. Now I need to see how long it’ll take to eat the rest of these things. I’m sure I can find better uses for the toppings because the oatmeals themselves aren’t bad. But if I’m going to eat the oatmeals by themselves, I might as well just stick to regular oatmeal. (By the way, my favorites are apple cinnamon and strawberries and cream.)
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