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Kashi Pumpkin Spice Flax granola bars are another fan request! Somehow these have been sitting on the cereal shelf for a very long time, but when we went through the Cereal Wednesday comments over at YouTube (always an adventure) we found this request and were happy to oblige.

Kashi Pumpkin Spice Flax granola bars are part of the TLC line of products. These Tasty Little Crunchies are very tasty. They taste like the spices of a pumpkin pie. Oddly, they don’t really actually taste like pumpkin at all. Also, they’re extremely dry. I adore dry foods, for some strange reason, but this one was so dry that I almost had to pour myself a glass of water to get it down my gullet. Also, the box shows lots of luscious looking pumpkin seeds, but I couldn’t really find any, except a halved seed embedded deep into the layers of the bars. I found the flax seeds right away! Thanks, Kashi! Love my flax!

Nutritionwise, Kashi Pumpkin Spice Flax doesn’t have added vitamins or minerals and is high on fat content at 6 grams per 2 bars (one foil package), but the protein and fiber contents are also high, as is the whole grain carb count, so that’s pretty fantastic news. The first ingredient listed:

Whole grain oats! And then the grain blend that Kashi is known for shows up in the list as well.

Overall, a tasty product that forgets to deliver on the pumpkin, is a bit too dry, and isn’t high on vitamins and minerals but is high on protein, whole grains, and fiber. Solid.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Pumpkin Spice Flax granola bars please visit the Kashi site.

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Spookylicious Pop-Tarts is a limited edition Kellogg’s flavor, just in time for Halloween! This chocolatey fudge toaster pastry is coated in orange frosting, and ghost, spider, and full moon candies.

Spookylicious Pop-Tarts are delicious cold and even more delicious toasted. The fudge heats up to taste just like a brownie. The frosting and candies add an additional sweet treat kick.

The nutrition information is, of course, not awesomely healthy and filled with allergens:

…but for Halloween we make this a small deduction. (Dude, it’s our favorite holiday, we get to do what we want on our favorite holiday.)

The Spooky Snack isn’t listed on the Kellogg’s website, so I’m posting it for your enjoyment:

Prep time 15 minutes
Total time 2 hours, 15 minutes

Yield: 24 pieces; 12 servings

Run out and grab a box of Spookylicious Pop-tarts before they make like ghosts and disappear.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Spookylicious Pop-Tarts please visit the Kellogg’s site.

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Magician’s Cereal Marshmallows are a true Marbits (“marshmallow bits”), hence their feature in this Marbits edition of Cereal Wednesday! Magician’s Cereal Marshmallows are only the crunchy marshmallow bits that you normally would find in cereals such as Lucky Charms.

The marshmallows are perfectly sweet, very crunchy, and taste delicious in cereal as well as on ice cream. I have no doubt they are amazing in hot chocolate. Kudos to the family who brought this idea to fruition.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Magician’s Cereal Marshmallows please visit their site and Like them on Facebook.

Photo credit: Magician’s Cereal Marshmallows

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Fiber One Blueberry Toaster Pastry is a General Mills product that is high in fiber and whole grain and peculiar on flavor.

Fiber One Blueberry Toaster Pastry tastes entirely like the Newton portion of a Fig Newton, and very little like blueberry at all. Perhaps that’s because it is being flavored with grape juice and colored by food dye instead of having much natural blueberry in it to start.

As you may recall from the video, this product has gelatin in it which, unless explicitly listed as vegetable gelatin, should be assumed to be an animal based gelatin and therefore this is not a vegetarian product.

It also has a large amount of wheat in it so isn’t gluten free either.

I was having trouble understanding what was providing the fiber in Fiber One Blueberry Toaster Pastry during filming. Enzyme modified soy protein is NOT the fiber ingredient, that’s just a cheaper way of adding soy to things, and therefore adding protein. The fiber ingredient is polydextrose, which always throws me off because it has the word dextrose in it, which to me means SUGAR. But here it means fiber. (Insert eyeroll here.)

Allergens listed: wheat, milk, and soy

Deductions for taste, method of flavoring, too much pastry, some pretty un-awesome ingredients, and lack of vitamins and minerals.

This thing’s lucky it got any bowls, GEEEEZ.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Fiber One Blueberry Toaster Pastry visit …well, for whatever reason General Mills doesn’t talk about their own freaking product, so how about you just go buy some at Amazon. For other Fiber One products visit Fiber One.

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Today is a dance-off between SnackWells Peanut Butter Bars and Annie’s Organic Peanutty Bars. Both are granola-based bars with whole peanuts. One happens to be filled with sugar while the other is purely organic. So… which one is going to win?

On taste, the SnackWells wins for me hands down. We’re comparing peanut butter products, and the SnackWells was finger-licking good. Peanut butter nirvana, if you will. Annie’s tasted like just a regular old granola bar with some peanuts thrown in. Didn’t even taste like it had a bunch of organic peanut butter mixed in. (Trust me, I’m from Vermont, I know what organic peanut butter tastes like.)

Nutrition information for the two bars is as follows:

Each contains 8 grams of whole grain per serving, and 5 whopping grams of fat. Peanut butter is a fatty yummy food, so it is what it is… but it’s good fat. But SnackWells has a bunch of fiber and a ton of protein in their bar, while Annie’s has (naturally) less of each. SnackWells adds vitamins and minerals that aren’t naturally found in the product, while Annie’s keeps it natural. Annie’s also keeps the ingredients list natural while there is a lot of processed sugar and preservatives found in the SnackWells list. Kudos to both for having whole peanuts in each bar. Pretty hard to fake a peanut.

Allergens for SnackWells: peanuts, soy, milk
Allergens for Annie’s: milk, peanuts, soy, tree nuts, and wheat.

SnackWells Peanut Butter Bowls:

Annie’s Organic Peanutty Bowls:

For more information about SnackWells Peanut Butter Bars visit Nabisco.

For more information about Annie’s Organic Peanutty Bars visit Annie’s site.

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Nature Valley® Chewy Granola Bars with a Naturally Flavored Yogurt Coating are a traditional chewy granola bar with a yogurt bottom.

The newest variety packs include a blueberry variety, but my box of bars was lacking the blue in the red, white, and blue motif, so you get Switzerland. (That makes more sense if you know what the flag of Switzerland looks like. I don’t mind waiting if you need to go look that up.)

The vanilla version of the bar was absolutely like wallpaper glue looks like it would taste. The strawberry version was like fireworks in my mouth. Talk about a world of difference…

And since I mentioned how hard it was to read the box, here’s what I was looking at during the video:

That’s the *full* size of the box, and that’s the crazy hard to read ingredients list.

Deductions on Strawberry for allergens and the box being hard to read. Even more deductions for Vanilla for being straight up awful.

Vanilla Bowls:

Strawberry Bowls:

For more information about Nature Valley Chewy Granola with Yogurt bars visit Nature Valley.

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Kellogg’s Frosted Chocolate Pop-Tarts Mini-Crisps are the name of the game in today’s Marbits edition.

This is a 100 calorie snack item made from a breakfast item, so qualifying as relevant to the CW world.

The Frosted Chocolate Mini-Crisps are super dry, not very chocolatey tasting, and the “frosted” part tastes like artificial sweetener on my tongue. They taste nothing like original Pop-Tarts, actually.

I was feeling generous when I gave Frosted Chocolate Pop-Tarts Mini-Crisps such a high bowl rating. I think I threw it a bowl for creative packaging even though I said we don’t pay attention to packaging in Marbits. Oh well. The other bowl is for a cool concept, too bad it doesn’t follow through with taste.

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Frosted Chocolate Pop-Tarts Mini-Crisps, including nutrition information, visit Kellogg’s.

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It’s so hard to stay mad at those tasty little squares of cinnamon goodness.

If you’re not aware, Cinnamon Toast Crunch briefly tried the “Amy the Vlogger” commercial campaign in which an excellent professional actress named Andrea Rosen was tasked to portray a woman in her ageless years with glasses and an orange sweater, sitting in a chair in her kitchen, suddenly bowled over by the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

The commercials have returned to our favorite CTC Crazy Squares, perhaps because the scripts of the vlogger commercials were stupid at best. (Yo, General Mills, call me if you want better ideas of how to rip off our site.)

In honor of the return to the Crazy Squares, I present to you…

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Treats bars are another Love’s Truck Stop special. Same allergen-packed fake milk coating bar format as the other Treats bars, but this one stole my heart with the first half bite. I adore cinnamon and I adore Blinky and The Professor, the kiddos who helped NYCWD eat CTC the first time around, so I had no choice but to love this bar.

Cinnamon Toast Crunch Treats are super portable despite the sticky milk coating on the bottom and large enough to actually satisfy your breakfast hunger. Super carb packed, lots of allergens, high on fat compared to a regular bowl of cereal, but too yummy to deduct a bowl for the bad stuff since this is a treat bar.

Click to see nutrition information and ingredients:

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about Cinnamon Toast Crunch Treats bar visit General Mills.

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Quaker True Delights Dark Chocolate Mocha Hazelnut Café Squares is a breakfast inspired granola bar. It is chock full of whole grain oats in the form of granola, has cellulose gum added to boost its fiber, has great for you hazelnuts, but then it ruins its healthy reputation with a chocolate coating, a chocolate drizzle, and ginormous chocolate chunks.

CONTAINS MILK, SOY AND HAZELNUT INGREDIENTS
MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF PEANUT AND OTHER TREE NUTS

This snack is also low on vitamins and minerals but high on allergens.

Considering the package I bought from the store was expired, I’m guessing these aren’t flying off the shelf. An unenjoyable first impression on my tongue plus a mixed bag of nutrition adds to my deductions.

I mentioned in the video my concern for possible wheat in the maltodextrin, but then wheat was not mentioned in the allergens list so I looked up maltodextrin. In the United States it is *usually* made from corn, while in Europe it’s typically made from wheat. I’ll leave it up to my gluten-free friends to sk00l me on if this cereal square makes them sick…

Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about True Delights Dark Chocolate Mocha Hazelnut Café Squares visit the Quaker site.

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NYCWD and I are bringing you more Love’s Truck Stop treats! This week it’s a battle between Golden Grahams Treats Peanut Butter Chocolate versus Chocolate Marshmallow. The cereal is made by General Mills but they sell these treats under a smaller company, probably a convenience store company, and I have yet to find it. No matter, we can still taste them and tell you if they’re good or bad.

Both of us agreed: The Golden Grahams Peanut Butter Chocolate bar was absolutely disgusting. It looked and tasted like CRAP. Off camera we let Georgie take a whiff of just a peanut butter chunk of the Peanut Butter Chocolate bar with no chocolate attached (note to everyone: NEVER feed chocolate to cats) but she wouldn’t even entertain the idea of being interested in it. But that Chocolate Marshmallow bar was delicious! We finished that one after filming. Loved the consistency, it was sweet but not sickeningly so, and it wasn’t messy! Yes, tons of sugar in both. But the sugar in the Peanut Butter Chocolate is completely overwhelming, the bar is sticky, and it just doesn’t taste like you’re supposed to eat it.

I couldn’t find any official General Mills information about these bars so, just like with Lucky Charms Marshmallow Treats, I had to scan in the wrappers:

Click each image to view the larger size.

Lots of allergens, so be careful. Also, gelatin is not vegetarian.

When NYCWD joins us we throw nutrition out the window and just care about taste and the shiny package.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

Chocolate Marshmallow Cereal Wednesday Bowls:

For more information about the Golden Grahams family of products visit General Mills.

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