Pop-Tarts Eggo

 

Product circa: 2023 

This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom, because we do not know if it’s only for a limited time.

What a fitting cross-branding! But sadly, these don’t stack up.

You might get the slightest of maple syrup flavoring, but I’ve had Pop-Tarts with more maple flavoring than this. Aside from that, it’s almost like an unflavored sugar filling. It’s probably the blandest Pop-Tarts variety I’ve ever tasted.

Pop-Tarts Eggo: NOM - Passable
Original Pop-Tarts Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon(for comparison): NOM NOM NOM - Great

Fruity Pebbles Rockin' Xtreme Colors

Boy, am I glad to be eating Fruity Pebbles in its loose cereal form again.

Post has issued a version of their cereal with neon colors, and trust me: the actual cereal is just as brightly colored as depicted on the box.  As mentioned before, aesthetic variations of noms are not reviewed on this site, even if they claim to be ephemeral.  However, this cereal boasts an "amped-up fruity taste", and so here we are.

Simply put, I can't tell the difference between this and the original cereal.  The differences might show themselves when tasted side by side, but I do not feel that I owe that experiment to this product.  The fruity and ever-so-artificial taste is there like it's always been, and that's not a bad thing.


Fruity Pebbles Rockin' Xtreme Colors:- Great
Original Fruity Pebbles(for comparison):- Great

Pop-Tarts Frosted Red Velvet

Many people may not realize it, but red velvet cake is a type of chocolate cake.  More specifically, it is a delicate chocolate cake with a hefty dose of vanilla, traditionally served with cream cheese frosting.  The cake's red color originated from the use of naturally-processed cocoa along with acidic ingredients like vinegar and buttermilk to bring out the cocoa's red anthocyanins.  The resulting earthy color was boosted years later with beet juice and food coloring.  Alton Brown can explain it better than I.

Once again, Pop-Tarts proves that it can make a really mean vanilla pastry.  Vanilla's flavor dominates here, with chocolate only barely detectable, if at all.  It seems that a hefty amount of butter flavoring was used in the pastry's filling, which is an attempt to simulate cream cheese frosting, I imagine.  And, just like a proper red velvet cake, these Pop-Tarts sport an attractive red color with a striking white frosting and filling.

This buttery vanilla effect is quite delicious, especially when toasted.  However, it barely resembles its namesake in flavor.

Pop-Tarts Frosted Red Velvet:- Great
Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison):-Good

Eggo Seasons S'mores

This appears to be the summer variety of Eggo's Seasons line, which offers seasonal variations of their normal products.  I welcome this marketing strategy.

To me, making something in a s'mores flavor is almost like cheating, since I've found that most of these iterations tend to be quite tasty.

But how do you make a frozen waffle taste like s'mores?  It looks like Eggo struggled with this question just like I did.  Instead of flavoring the entire waffle, they inserted small bits of marshmallow and chocolate into the batter so that the final product is speckled with little sweet bits.  The waffle itself seems to be of their whole wheat variety, which I suppose is to imitate the graham cracker in this equation.

In the end, it ends up tasting not much different than the original.  The occasional bite will have a sweet and chewy tooth to it, and it overall tastes slightly of chocolate.  It's good, but not different enough to be notable.


Eggo Seasons S'mores:- Good
Original Eggo(for comparison):- Good

Pop-Tarts Red, White & Berry

Shame on you, Pop-Tarts...

This summer's special flavor of the famous pastries was Red, White & Berry, in honor of Independence Day.

Unfortunately, these seem to be an identical rehash of last year's 2012 Team USA flavor, minus the "gold medal" foil wrapping.  What's worse, the few pastries I could stomach were stiff and dry, as if last year's stock had been repackaged and reused.  I can't prove that, and so I won't try.  But it's a disturbing prospect.

I have no problem reusing a review for a reused product.  Click here to read it.


Pop-Tarts Red, White & Berry:- Good
Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison):- Good

Pop-Tarts Spookylicious

The 2012 backlog continues!  We're throwing in a Halloween edition which I didn't pick up until after October.

Once again, these Pop-Tarts are a bit obnoxious with the amount of frosting and sprinkles, and while these additions add little to the experience, they are adorable and aren't really detrimental to the product.

The bite is soft and fudgey.  The chocolate filling is less sweet and more of a dark chocolate variety than most other chocolatey Pop-Tarts.  It's pleasant, but unremarkable.  The restrained sweetness is a nice surprise, but the filling needs just a bit more flavor.

When toasted, the gooey fudge increases viscosity and tastes a bit more like dark chocolate, devoid of a sweetness which I think it needs more of.

These pale in comparison to Pop-Tarts S'mores, which is a shining example of the order of what this snack could have been.


Pop-Tarts Spookylicious:- Good
Original Pop-Tarts S'mores(for comparison):- Great

Printed Fun Pop-Tarts Frosted Sugar Cookie

Arguably a holiday flavor, Pop-Tarts has rolled out their Sugar Cookie variety for at least the 2nd year in a row.  Perhaps it's simply a wintry flavor and not specifically for the holidays?

Anyway, I'm glad it's back.

Not only are its frosted fronts printed with adorable images, but its flavor and texture rank at the top if its class.  It's yet another vaguely vanilla flavor with perhaps a bit of butter, but it has an added doughy flavor that those cake products are able to achieve.  Along with that, the filling inside is very dense and chewy such that it takes effort to pull a bite away.  It may sound strange, but it's very satisfying.

When toasted, almost everything about it improves.  The sweetness stays the same, the texture softens, while all the flavors intensify, especially the butter.  It's almost like eating a sugar cookie straight out of the oven, and that's not hyperbole.  Incredible.


Printed Fun Pop-Tarts Sugar Cookie: - Outstanding

Original Pop-Tarts (Strawberry, for comparison): - Good

Pop-Tarts 2012 Team USA

The sixth of several summer-related posts in a row!

Pop-Tarts issued a flavor celebrating the participation of the United States Olympic team in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, England during August.

This product has a few humorous and notable things going on with it:

1) The name of the flavor is "2012 Team USA".  That's it.  Despite it claiming in smaller writing below the title that it is a "mixed berry" pastry, it's technically 2012 Team USA-flavored.
2) The foil wrappers inside the box are gold, not silver(like usual), because of course, the USA accepts nothing less than gold for the Olympics.
3) The pastries themselves are the most obnoxious I've ever seen.  The pastry dough is colored with deep red, with a white frosting and red and blue rock candy sprinkles.

As for the taste, it's barely discernible from the standard Strawberry Pop-Tarts.  If anything, the flavor is more muddled and less characteristic.


 Pop-Tarts 2012 Team USA:- Good
Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison):- Good

acquired: Giant

The Amazing Spider-Man Limited Edition Spidey Berry

The fifth of several summer-related posts in a row!

Another standalone limited time cereal, this product also celebrates the Amazing Spider-Man film from this summer.

This "berry" cereal is actually just flavored with strawberry, and it wafts to your nose from the moment you open the bag.  Speckled with "lizard villain" marshmallows, these strawberry "webs" are almost of the same construction as what you'd find in Honeycomb cereal.

But quite frankly, familiar expectations should end there.  Why?  Because while the flavor of the cereal easily resembles that of strawberry milk, the sweetness of the "webs" are dialed down almost to zero, with only the marshmallows providing each bite's sugar.  I applaud the company for avoiding the unnecessary calories(think of the children!) and avoiding the saccharine pit into which these cereals too often fall, but unfortunately I think that the stuff just needs to be a bit more sweet.

The restraint of this cereal's sweetness is a novelty that makes it interesting and bumps it just barely into the 2-NOM range, but it'd be better with more sugar.


The Amazing Spider-Man Limited Edition Spidey Berry: - Good

Pop-Tarts Yum-Azing Vanilla

 The fourth of several summer-related posts in a row!

Typical cross-branding with this new flavor of Pop-Tarts which commemorates The Amazing Spider-Man movie released this summer.  It turns out this product also comes in a red box.  (Side note: I've heard that Marvel's licenses are such that they expire if they are not actively used within a certain frequency of years, which is why the movie market is being flooded with Marvel superhero reboots.  But, I can't find any hard source on this.)

This pastry boasts vanilla creme with bright red frosting.  As an adorable bonus, the sprinkles are large and in the shape of small spiders!

Unfortunately, this is a great example of a Pop-Tarts snack gone wrong.  The vanilla filling is nigh flavorless.  Worse, it somehow lends a candy-like flavor to what little vanilla is there, almost like a cheap supermarket bakery's cake frosting.  That, along with the big crunch of the frosting, and the bigger crunch of the spider sprinkles, and the experience of this is more like crunching on hard candy, made little better if you decide to toast it.

This product barely makes it into the 1-NOM zone.  If you want good vanilla Pop-Tarts, then seek out the humorously long named Pop-Tarts Festival Fun Frosted Vanilla I-Scream Cone.

Pop-Tarts Yum-Azing Vanilla: -Passable

Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison): - Good


acquired: Giant

Ice Age Continental Drift Cinnamon Cereal

The first of several summer-related posts in a row!

A one-off limited time cereal?  Alrighty then.

This stuff was created to commemorate the film Ice Age: Continental Drift released this summer.

When the box opens, a cinnamon aroma quickly wafts to your nose and you soon realize you'll be comparing this product to Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

When dry, the cereal's ultra-crunchy corn-puff construction could be compared to Cap'n Crunch cereal, except that it's even more crunchy, and indeed it has that notorious ability to shred the roof of one's mouth.  However, once it's sat in milk for a bit, the outer crunchiness gives way to a lovely chewiness which I don't think I've quite experienced in any other cereal.

The flavor is as interesting as the texture.  While one may expect a run-of-the-mill cinnamon cereal, what one gets instead is a formula which is conservative on sugar and heavy on cinnamon.  The lack of overbearing sweetness makes one pay attention to the actual flavor of the cereal, which is so heavy on cinnamon that it's downright earthy.  The palate is left with a dry, woody aftertaste.

This cinnamon cereal is elevated into something more sophisticated than its peers.  It's like comparing a Single Malt Scotch to Jack Daniels.  It's almost into 4-NOM territory.


Ice Age Continental Drift Cinnamon Cereal: - Great

Pop-Tarts Wildlicious Frosted Wild! Grape

 Note: This is a Presumptive Ephemeral Nom.

The Pop-Tarts Wildlicious flavors continue.

Why they thought "grape" was wild enough to be marketed in this packaging/sub-brand is beyond me.  It must be sour grape or something, right?

No, it's just normal grape.  I give credit to the brand, because I don't think a grape flavor of these pastries has ever been done before.  It tastes exactly how you think it will: just like a typical Pop-Tarts fruit flavor, such as strawberry, but with the distinct flavor of grape Kool-Aid instead.

It's tasty and different and yet par for the course.  And much like the previous Wildlicious flavor, the taste of the product does not match its marketing.



Pop-Tarts Wildlicious Frosted Wild! Grape: - Good
Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison): - Good

Acquired: supermarket

Pop-Tarts Wildlicious Frosted Wild! Fruit Fusion

Note: This product was originally reviewed as an ephemeral nom, but as of 8/14/2013, it appears to be permanent.

Pop-Tarts has had their Wildlicious line out for a while now, but I don't think they're destined for greatness.  Their flavors are a bit wacky and their package designs don't scream "market stability" to me.

The packaging itself is one of the craziest I've ever seen, with its eye-catching blue and orange schema that seems like it's meant to mesmerize young children in the cereal aisle to scream for their parents to buy it.  When unsheathed, the pastry's craziness continues with bright orange frosting (with additional red frosting drizzles) and also what Pop-Tarts is calling "sprinkles" but is really more like flecks of colored rock candy.  Geez.  The aesthetic of this product so far is exhausting.

Oddly enough, the flavor of this visually and nomenclaturally complicated food is anything but.  While the marketing would have you believe that it would taste like a cornucopia explosion of myriad fruits, it is instead quite tame, and dare I say refined.  To my surprise, the dominant flavors in the filling are the very ones pictured on the box's front: strawberry, cherry, and orange.  The snack tastes mostly like the original Strawberry Pop-Tarts, but clearly cherry has been mixed in as well.  The most surprising and pleasant addition to this mix is the slightest bit of orange whose tartness balances the sweetness in a way that makes this superior to most fruity Pop-Tarts I've ever had.  While its website would have me believe that the filling also contains raspberry and blueberry, and its ingredients list would suggest apple, the only other flavor I can pick up is perhaps the smallest hint of banana.

This flavor is superior and elevated compared to almost any other fruity Pop-Tarts product because of the balancing addition of tartness, but it's not quite enough to get it over the 2-NOM plateau.

Pop-Tarts Wildlicious Frosted WILD! Fruit Fusion: (Good)
Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison): (Good)


Acquired: supermarket

Pop-Tarts Festival Fun Frosted Vanilla I-Scream Cone

Pop-Tarts has rolled out their Ice Cream Shoppe flavors, if I'm being honest, so far so good!

I'm filled with delight as I pull the pastries out of the wrapper and am greeted with sprinkles on the Pop-Tart's frosting!  Yay!  This vanilla ice cream-flavored treat is topped with chocolate frosting, which is an interesting choice.

The smell of them instantly bring me back to when I was a kid, because these smell just like the Pop-Tarts S'mores flavor, which I ate every morning for years.

On the first taste, it's quite sweet.  I then detect a doughy note, almost like a cake flavor.  I'm not sure why it's there (perhaps to mimic the flavor of the cone?), but it's definitely welcome.  The next flavor is an easy vanilla that borders on a marshmallow-like sweetness, with perhaps even a bit of coconut in there!  Last is chocolate-- this might be the first time I've ever detected the flavor of the frosting on a Pop-Tart.  It works amazingly well.  Everything works together here.

When toasted, I find that this product doesn't taste quite as good.  The flavor is deadened a bit, and I daresay that the texture is less satisfyingly chewy.

However, notice that the front of this Pop-Tarts' box says loudly "TRY 'EM FROZEN".  Well ok, then!  I put one in the freezer and came back to it the next morning.  While I see what they're doing there with the frozen "ice cream" motif, I think the strategy is misplaced.  The texture took on a even-more-pleasant chewiness, but the flavor of the pastry was almost undetectable, and the frozen frosting snapped unsettlingly when bitten.  No thanks.

In all, the snack was best at room temperature, but make no mistake, this is one of the best Pop-Tarts flavors I've ever had.

Pop-Tarts Festival Fun Frosted Vanilla I-Scream Cone: (Great)

Original Pop-Tarts(Strawberry, for comparison): (Good)

Acquired: supermarket

Fruity Pebbles Treats

Note: I try only to remark upon limited time and/or rare products on this blog, not simply new products.  Unless otherwise confirmed via research, any product presented on this site is presumed to be limited time and/or rare by my own personal opinion.  This product is an example.

I was one of myriad children who was taught to make Rice Krispies Treats by a parent or relative.  They're delicious of course, and simple enough to warrant beginning to teach a child their way around the kitchen.  If you were like me, then there was a point when you underwent an invigorating realization that the Rice Krispies in the recipe were easily interchangeable with any other cereal, and your imagination began to run wild.  As an imaginative exercise, perhaps you sought to realize which cereal would be the wildest to make Treats with.  If you had, then you probably would have settled on Fruity Pebbles Treats.

In my opinion, Fruity Pebbles is one of the gems in the cereal aisle.  It's been around forever, the box features your favorite Flintstones characters, and the cereal offers a texture and flavor that no other brand attempts to match.  My jaw dropped when I found these in the store, but alas, I ended up disappointed.

Honestly, the packaging on these is great; the wrappers are bright red, and they feature a photograph of the snack, which is quite colorful.  Sadly, the snack itself fails to impress.  The clustered cereal doesn't offer the bright and fruity burst of flavor that the original cereal does; a dull version of the original is offered instead.  The texture of the snack is strange... it has an almost elastic quality where it will compress when you squeeze or bite into it, but it will reform to its original shape quickly afterward.  I realize that marshmallow is spongy and sometimes elastic, but it's a very unsettling texture that doesn't show itself in home-made Rice Krispies Treats, or even the packaged ones.  Lastly, there's a salty taste in the snack that leaves you with a salty aftertaste.

Ultimately, Fruity Pebbles Treats offer over-processed artificial flavor and texture.  You're much better off making them from scratch.

Fruity Pebbles Treats: 0 NOMS (Unpleasant)

Original Rice Krispies Treats(for comparison): (Great)

Acquired: supermarket

Printed Fun Pop-Tarts Gingerbread

 Another holiday limited edition and in one of my favorite flavors, and you could color me excited.

On top of that, the front of these Pop-Tarts have fun prints on them, which also belies that the fronts are plain instead of covered with frosting, which I often find is a bit overkill with most Pop Tarts. I've always been the kind of guy that enjoys the pie crust or cake more than the pie filling or frosting, so a plain Pop Tart is okay with me.

Unfortunately, these Pop-Tarts still fall into the trap of overbearing sweetness. Whereas most Pop-Tarts fillings are a fruity, syrupy jam (or otherwise a grainy paste in the case of spicy/earthy/chocolatey flavors), this version's filling is straight up marshmallow. With each bite, the filling oozes and stretches into strings, like a good fried mozzarella stick. Marshmallow with gingerbread? Why?

While the filling may not have hit the mark, the pastry dough is a much better creation. It parts ways in style from most, if not all Pop-Tarts doughs I've had. Whether or not it's able to claim the appropriate health accolades, this version's dough takes a wheat/whole grain approach. Its texture is much more tender than you'd expect. Its flavor is lightly of gingerbread, and it has that earthy and wheaty flavor that you'd expect from whole wheat bread or whole wheat pasta. It's also a bit more salty than I expected. The pastry dough for this product is legitimately interesting.

Overall, while the dough is different and good and the filling is basically marshmallow creme, I feel they're very much mismatched. This stuff is only worth a buy if you adore marshmallow, or if you're buying just for the novelty of it.

EDIT: I just realized that while I best enjoy Pop-Tarts at room temperature, the product deserves to also be tried heated/toasted, since that is the recommended serving suggestion.  Wow, these things are surprisingly different and better when heated.  The gingerbread flavor of the dough is more pronounced, and finally the inner marshmallow has reached a soft and not a spongy consistency.  Somehow, when heated, the marshmallow filling actually works with the pastry!  I will be bumping up the final NOM rating by 1, and I will be sure to try every Pop-Tarts product heated and also at room temperature from now on!

Printed Fun Pop Tarts Gingerbread: (Good)
Original Pop-Tarts (Strawberry, for comparison): (Good)

Acquired: supermarket

Dulce de Leche Cheerios

 Note: I try only to remark upon limited time and/or rare products on this blog, not simply new products.  Unless otherwise confirmed via research, any product presented on this site is presumed to be limited time and/or rare by my own personal opinion.  This product is an example.

I would say that this stuff is mostly disappointing.  A trend I've come across is that when processed food is flavored with "dulce de leche", it will most often simply contain both sugar and some sort of butter flavoring in an attempt to capture the milky flavor of dulce de leche. (This product may suffer from an identity crisis, since the product's front packaging indicate, at different spots, that it's both flavored with dulce de leche and caramel, which are not the same thing.)

That may be an oversimplification in this case, but the flavor of these Cheerios are not completely unlike the Honey Nut variety.  Half of the cheerios in this box are made of corn (as opposed to the normal wheat), which I imagine is thought to add to the caramel-like flavor via the corn's natural sweetness, but instead it lends the flavor of a simple corn cereal, like Corn Pops.

In the end, while this cereal isn't bad, it simply tastes like sweet Cheerios with additional flavors of corn, butter, and perhaps brown sugar.



Dulce de Leche Cheerios: (Good)

Original Honey Nut Cheerios (for comparison): (Good)

Acquired: supermarket