Pop-Tarts: Bakery Style.

Look at the box! LOOK AT IT! If there was EVER a box trying to market itself to children with its colorful sprinkles, innocent white frosting and in your face letterbox captions, this would be it! Like a magnetic force your eyes are drawn to it immediately! You may wanna shield your children's eyes as you dart through the pastry aisle, averting row after row of sugary treats. A precaution best suited for preventing a supermarket freakout of epic proportions! On the docket? the fairly new Pop-Tarts creation, Frosted Confetti Cupcake. Forget a cartoon mascot shoveling its weak gimmick down your yappers, Kellogg's does that job through eye-popping Pop-Tart visuals!

I've never had Confetti Cupcake before. Or maybe I have. My short term memory sucks. But be warned! The minute you open the package you'll be hit with such a strong, buttery scent you'll nearly convulse! Yeah, it's that nauseating! As soon as I undressed this Pop-Tart's wrapper to expose the polka-dotted pastry underneath, the smell of butter invaded my senses. Yes - all five of them! And guess what? they weren't even toasted yet.

Ahh, I'll never be whole again!

So yeah, 3 minutes later my toaster yelps and that insufferable smell you get once you open the wrapper? multiply it by  3.  The vanilla frosting has a slightly tougher exterior than you'd come to expect from an ordinary Pop-Tart and the colorful sprinkles become a nuisance, falling off all over the place. Down the hatch! Bleh. Mediocrity. Of course, it's a Pop-Tart.





The frosting has that really cheap synthetic taste of Vanilla, ya know? Like the bargain brand pre-baked Cupcakes you buy in those plastic cases for like 4.99$ at your local grocers. And gives the pastry a tough texture. With the overpowering aroma of butter, though  it's hard to get a sense for that vanilla flavor, it pales in comparison. I mean, you know it's there - but that may just be my visual perception sending signals to my brain like "Hey you! Yeah, you - you're eating a vanilla-flavored Pop-Tart! Now leave me alone!".

Down the hatch!

Overall, not bad. I've had better Pop-Tarts and I'd say easily out of all them this would be somewhere on my bottom ten list. As aesthetically pleasing as it may be, the pastry itself is not that exciting. My guess is all the effort was put into making the box colorful enough to distract you from the monotony the lays dormant inside of the package. Curse you, Kellogg's! .....*NOM* *NOM* *NOM*




5.5/10

Festival Fun? ha.

Vanilla I-SCREAM Cone. Vanilla III-SCREEAMM Coone. Yeah - we see the depths of Pop-Tarts creativity in that alone. What's in the box isn't much different. The limited edition Pop-Tarts Festival Fun Frosted Vanilla III-SCREEAMM Coone *exhales* is about as interesting as its play-on words. Heed the warning of mediocrity! I tried this yesterday, but not before reading reviews of it first from The Impulsive Buy, and The Mind of a Big Cat, which said it tasted like the S'mores Pop-Tarts flavor. A little let-down, but still optimistic I opened the box and ripped open the package.



Sure enough, it did look a lot like the S'mores version. Only real difference was this had sprinkles, with no chocolate-marshmallow filling. My Pop-Tarts batch had an uneven frosted coating, but that's OK - the taste it what counts. I popped the bad-boy in the toaster and waited my habitual three-minutes out watching Futurama on the telly at 3:30AM in the morning. The familiar aroma of S'mores Pop-Tarts filled the air and as I sprung out of bed anticipating it's leap from the toaster there it was, hot and ready to go!



I broke the Pop-tarts into 4 slightly equal halves - like I normally do - and proceeded to take my first bite.OK, it smells like the S'mores Pop-Tart. It looks like the S'mores Pop-Tart. But there's a slight distinction in its taste. There's a sense of familiarity there, but the filling has a more vanilla-frosting like flavor than the marshmallow-y S'mores kind. That's a relief - kind of. I mean, at least Kellogg's made some sort of effort in distinction of their new flavor.




I however didn't taste any Festival. Nor did I feel like I was at a festival when eating this half-concoction of the S'mores treat. The chocolate frosting was sweet, like your generic supermarket chocolate cake, and the sprinkles that were unevenly distributed on the coating didn't bring much more than a gritty, but pleasant crunch. Kelloggs - how dare you. Where do you get off putting Festival Fun in its name? For that matter, why's  "III-SCREEAMM" in the title? OHHHH - Try it frozen. No thanks.



All and all. The Pop-Tarts Festival Fun Frosted Vanilla III-SCREEAMM Coone breaks a lot a promises, like a bad politician. You can to try to imagine real hard that its like a Festival, but it just isn't. It's A S'mores Pop-Tart with a few minor tweaks.AND IT TASTES NOTHING LIKE A VANILLA III-SCREEAMM Coone!


5/10

A dentist's worst nightmare: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Treats

On a trip to Avon Park, Florida a couple weeks back I came across a plethora of cereal bar treats. They had: Coco Puffs Treats (picked it up), Lucky Charms Treats (picked it up), Honey Nut Cheerios Cereal Bars (picked it up), Fruity Pebbles Treats (picked it up) and a bunch more that I don't remember and probably picked up. I'm here 3 weeks later to tell you that I ate off almost 2/3rds of the cereal bars I bought and I'm here to review one of the 4... or 5... or whatever, plenty.

If you're no stranger to the these sugar-laden cinnamon-battered cereal squares you've either eaten enough of them for your dentist to want to yank your head off and mount it on his wall like a prized trophy or you're a parent of a child who's eaten enough of them to keep your local dentist office in business. Either way, you've come across them.

As soon I ripped open the wrapper I got a whiff of its strong cinnamon presence. Almost overwhelming. I took a bite and the cinnamon presence was so strong it bombarded into my taste-buds headquarters like an F.D.A drug bust and started kicking my taste-buds ass!

The cinnamon pretty much dominates most of the other aspects of the treat. The other notable presence would be the sugary flavor, which does feel like a tad much, but I'm a fan of junk-food so it was tolerable. However, the overtly sugar-cinnamon-y taste may be overbearing for those not big on foods that will rot their teeth to its raw nerve.


These treats come at 24(g) per bar. They're not as messy as the cereal version where you're getting the sugar and cinnamon powder all over your fingers, and the nice-crunchy texture compliments the flavor well. Overall, I was SLIGHTLY disappointed that the cinnamon presence was so strong (almost nauseating),  not really allowing any of the other flavors to flourish, but its still satisfying enough to NOM NOM NOM through each bar like the Cookie Monster during his lunch period. Pick these up if you're fan of the Cereal... and get ready for the overinflated dentist bills you'll likely incur. ;)



Rating: 6/10

The Start To Truly Foody-ism

Eek, I know - another wannabe food blogger jumping on the food blogging bandwagon. Cripes, these guys multiply like cockroaches. First off, I'd like to apologize in advance for the terrible literary skills you're gonna witness upon visiting this website. I'm not great at bringing people into my world and sharing my experiences through cleverly worded puns and all that other stuff professional food bloggers do to entice their readers. What I'm going to do is basically try my best to review foods I like on an occasional basis and hopefully you'll like what you see.




I'd like to start by saying I'm a BIG FAN of junk food, so you're going see a lot of reviews revolving around just that. If you're a fan of junk food you'll come to like this page if my wording skills don't scare you off. I eat junk food all the time. I love it. I can't get enough of it. If there was a machine out there that would zap junk food items down to 0 calories across the board on the nutritional scale whilst retaining its flavor, I wouldn't get to enjoy it, because I'd die from a heart attack hearing the news.



I also frequent plenty of Food blogs out there, such as The Impulsive Buy and Fat Guy Food Blog.  I think the only thing that really gravitates me to their blogs, other than seeing pictures of Junk Food items and salivating over them like Pin-up babes, is the way the reviews are written. Insightful, enticing, funny and creative - you won't get much of that here, but I'll try.



There isn't much beyond that to know about me, or this site. Occasionally reviews will be posted of foods I come across and if I choose to make a review of them it'll be done. All the Junk Food Junkies out there - WELCOME TO THE BLOG. To all the veggie-heads who've already made up their mind about me and my website, no hard feelings huh?



-R.J