A Round-Up of the Seasonal Foodstuffs of Halloween 2012

Warning: Reading This Article May or May Not Give Your Eyes Diabetes

I don’t know about you, but to me, it just feels as if this year’s Halloween season flew by WAY too quickly. It seemed like just five minutes ago, we were still having to rummage our way through summertime junk to find the pre-sale Jack O’ Lantern sippy cups at Walgreens, and now? The seasonal sections of every single big-box-mart in America is cluttered with red, white and green trinkets as opposed to black and orange doodads. Hell, All Hallows Eve went by so fast, I’m not even 100 percent sure we actually HAD a Halloween this autumn.

While I can’t say with all sincerity that I got the most out of my Halloween sojourns in 2012, I can say that as far as seasonal junk food went, my ass got fat in a hurry. While lacking in most of the other areas of seasonal merriment, I made darn sure that I wasn’t going to miss out on the cavalcade of “limited time only” releases that get spat out during the autumn deluge, and all in all? I’d say this year’s roundup of seasonal-ish food items was every bit as stellar - if not even better - than the championship season we had back in 2011.

First up on a whirlwind tour of this year‘s Hallow-foods, we’ve got Little Debbie’s “Bat Brownies.” Last year, the same company gave us these weird pumpkin-flavored snack cakes that had spooky (albeit smiling) demon faces on them, and in 2012, they definitely upped the ante and then some.

As you can no doubt see, the bats more or less resemble brown bowties, but really, who can complain about having brownies of ANY size, shape or consistency in front of them?

The overall craftsmanship on the bats isn’t too bad, as the things had a lot of etched-in grooves and lines that gave them a better overall definition than most animal-shaped snack cakes you’ll encounter. That, and the taste was pretty palatable, too - if you can’t enjoy fudge-flavored vampires, how are you ever going to enjoy this thing we call “existing,” anyway?

While I may be cheating just  a bit with these pumpkin pie-flavored Pop-Tarts (in two aspects, since not only are the snacks NOT directly Halloween-related, they were actually released as “limited-time” items last year, as well), I think I can easily be forgiven for this trespass for one VERY compelling reason:

THE BACK OF THE BOX HAS INSTRUCTIONS FOR DO IT YOURSELF POP-TART TURKEYS, WITH CANDY CORN GOBBLERS. If you don’t think there will be a cornucopia of these things at my Thanksgiving table later this month, you sir, have no understanding of what it is that makes life worth living.

As far as the gustatory quality of the Tarts themselves, they weren’t too shabby. I hate to summarize them by saying that they had a pumpkin taste (quite surprising, I know), but there was a pretty strong, almost cinnamon-like flavor on display here. It’s not my favorite Tart variation out there (certainly, it’s no match for the Spookylicious variety we all know and love), but they weren’t too bad, either.

I’ve seen these Russell Stover mini-packets on display for a couple of years now, but this was the first Halloween season I ever worked up enough curiosity to try them out.

As you can see, the two varieties I picked up were of the milk chocolate and peanut butter-with-chocolate-around it genus. Personally, I’m more of a fan of the PB’n’chocolate set-up, but if milk chocolate is in front of me, you know it’s going to get devoured, regardless. Hell, if I was lactose-intolerant, it would still probably get eaten. “Yummy” takes precedence over “burning” any day, doesn’t it?

While the peanut butter variation was, all in all, the better-tasting product, there’s no denying which product had the better aesthetic merits. The one on the right looks more like a hand grenade than a seeded, vegetable-like fruit, if you polled me on the matter.

I saw these Count Chocula cereal bars at just one retailer throughout the entire Halloween season, and had I not strolled in there that fateful weekday evening (primarily because I was out of knockoff vanilla flavored-soda) I never would have known that such a product existed.

Earlier this year, I decided to make my own Rice Krispies-like Count Chocula bars, and wouldn’t you know it? These envious souls over at General Mills had steal my proverbial thunder and make their own comestible of the sort. Granted, the things are more like glorified granola bars than marshmallow squares, but irked, I doth remain.

I hope you like chocolate, because eating one of these things is akin to drowning in a river of cocoa ala that fat German kid in “Willy Wonka.” Traditionalists will be happy to note that the bars have a very distinct Count Chocula taste, but that puffy texture doesn’t necessarily gel all that well with the little chocolate drops that stud the bars like rhinestone. It’s all right, overall, but I doubt that anyone would want to make it a weekly purchase.

White Chocolate Candy Corn M&Ms are one of the few totally new offerings that I gave a look-see this season. As one of officially two candy corn fans on the planet, I was quite ecstatic to see this variation on store shelves. And then, I tried them, and well…let’s just say I have more than a few problems.

I’m not 100 percent sure what the guys at Mars put on these things, but SOMETHING in it has to be an ingredient I’m allergic to. After downing about three handfuls of the candies, my throat started to burn. By the time I was finished with the bag, I was almost ready to dry heave.

Of course, that’s not to say that the products taste bad or anything, because I thought they were pretty damn yummy, actually. That, and I really dug the autumnal color scheme - perhaps not enough to overlook the fact that the product almost killed me, but enough to take it into consideration for a re-buy, though.

Most folks know Cadberry best for their chocolate, syrup-nucleus candies released every Easter. Perhaps smelling dinero to be made-o, they decided to hop aboard the Halloween bandwagon and release a special All Hallows Eve variation - called, fittingly enough, a “SCREME EGG.”

As stated earlier, I’m not the world’s biggest milk chocolate fan, but you really don’t have to twist my arm to eat some, either. Well, this newfangled product officially crossed over my threshold for milk-chocolate tolerance, as it was so damned sweet that I could feel my teeth revolt as soon as I crunched into one.

And for those of you that have a thing against multi-textured food, the inside of one of these things are super-duper sugary and gooey, and to some extent, resemble alien afterbirth. Just for-your-information, folks.

In case you couldn’t tell, pumpkin-shaped candies are the Halloween du jour in 2012, and the fine folks behind Snickers just KNEW that they couldn’t be the only kids on the block without a gourd-shaped chocolate bar this year.

I think these Snickers Pumpkins were probably the weirdest shaped candies I encountered over the holiday season. When most people think “pumpkins,” they think rotund, but the choc-o-engineer Snickers hired decided to take the completely antithetical route. Wait, you mean zucchini AREN’T traditionally used to make Jack O’ Lanterns in the States?

To be fair though, the anorexic pumpkins DID taste quite a bit like Snickers. They may not have gotten the noun right, but at least they can take solace in nailing the adjective part of the item’s moniker.

I guess Wonka’s Spooky Nerds were sort of the odd duck out among this year’s Halloween foodstuffs, since they were literally the only product I tried this season that DIDN’T, in part or in whole, consist of gooey, sugary constituents.

As you’d surmise, the one-two punch here consists of orange and nondescript tropical drink-flavored candies. I’m not exactly sure what the white candies are supposed to taste like, but I think they had a nicer kick than the tangerine ones. And that may or may not mean I’m racist, at least as far as junk food is concerned.

Of course, the fun with Nerds is just shoveling an entire box into your mouth hole and slurping down as many various flavors as possible with about as much discretion as one of Pavlov’s puppies. In that, I can most certainly say that Spooky Nerds, indeed, are things you could probably eat, if you really wanted to.

And to conclude this year’s round-up, we come to yet ANOTHER pumpkin-shaped candy bar variation - this time around, Butterfingers’ attempt to corner the totally not-at-all over-served market.

And visually, these things don’t disappoint at all. While most of the chocolate pumpkin items released this season fluctuate from totally blank to well-defined (albeit predictable), the Pumpkin-fingers look like miniature works of pop-art; if we can build engraving machines that can mass produce artifacts of such a fine aesthetic as these, then certainly, a cancer cure can’t be far off.

And yeah, to totally seal the deal, the things even taste just like their source inspiration. It’s difficult to name any single candy as the absolute best of the holiday period, but considering the qualitative and visual merits of these chocolate bars, I think it’s hard to argue against naming anything else as “the Samhain season’s best.”

And while it wasn’t a bad haul this year for me, individually, I still think I should’ve taste-tested more foodstuffs than I actually ended up ingesting. With that in mind, I assure you that next Halloween, I will at least DOUBLE my tally or I’ll do something amazingly stupid, like eat cheese spread from the Family Dollar or pay full price for a Ron Paul book or something. All in all, my inability to devour as much Halloween candies as I thought I could is surely a sign of detrimental aging. Sigh…I can’t believe I never found time to try the new “spooky-flavored” Big League Chew gum pouches, either!

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How to Make Count Chocula Rice Krispies Treats!

A Marshmallow Square Monster Mash Featuring Guest Appearances by Boo Berry and Franken Berry, Too!

I don’t know if you are aware of this by now, but I sorta’ like General Mills’ Monster Cereals - you know, the horror-themed breakfast product trifecta of Count Chocula, Boo Berry and Franken Berry. That pack at one point included two additional monster-foodstuffs - a vanilla-flavored cereal called Yummy Mummy and a lime-flavored offering called Fruit Brute - and I’m seriously thinking about starting a national letter writing campaign to get General Mills to put the two discontinued cereals back into production for the Halloween 2013 season. While that uphill battle is still a couple of months away from kicking off, it just wouldn’t be a proper Halloween around Jimbo’s neck of the woods without SOME look at the contemporary holy trinity of monster-themed, sugar-encrusted breakfast goods, and this year, I decided to up the ante, and HARD.

I’ve never really been a fan of Rice Krispies Treats - or, if you’re a fan of more generic, non-trademarked descriptors, “marshmallow squares” - but there was just something about the idea of turning Count Chocula into a gooey cereal bar that just felt…I don’t know, necessary, for this Halloween season. But hey, why stop there? The last time I checked, there’s plenty of room in the mixing bowl for Franken Berry and Boo Berry, too - which means it was nigh time for a marshmallow sauce-soaked monster mash around casa de Internet is in America.

To replicate the experiment at home, you’re going to need a few things. Clearly, you’re going to need a box each of the General Mills cereals, and also three bags of marshmallows (one bag of the really big kind, and two of the miniature variety that you normally chunk into your hot chocolate come December.) You’re also going to need some butter, some corn syrup, and some heavy duty mixing equipment. Trust me, folks - if you’re not an excellent whisker, you may not be man enough to continue with the project.

To begin, you’re going to have to melt a stick of butter in a fairly large sized pot. From there, you’re going to have to annex about a cup and a half of corn syrup - a vital ingredient that serves as the adhesive that “glues” your little puffed rice ghosts and marshmallow bats together - into the bowl. The end result of step one of the process should look gross as shit, as you can no doubt see for yourself.

Step two entails dumping the large marshmallows into the pot. I really cannot stress how important it is to have top-notch whisking and beating utensils at your disposal. If it all possible, I would recommend dragging out the old electric egg-beater, if your have one. And if not? I’d say about a week of lifting weights before beginning the recipe would be the bare minimum to prepare you for the later stages of the prep work.

After dumping the large bag into the bowl, that’s your cue to insert the two bags of smaller marshmallows. If you’re looking at a physical estimate of how much you’ll need, I’d say that we’re probably looking at about 22 ounces of product here - a 10.5 ounce bag of large marshmallows, with two 5.5 ounce bags of the smaller marshmallows, ought to be enough to do the trick.

It doesn’t take long for your marshmallows to coalesce into a nice, creamy white ocean of sugary madness, and to make matters worse, you have a really finite amount of time before the marshmallow sauce begins hardening. As soon as the lumps in your sauce seem to disappear, that’s your cue to open the cereal boxes.

You can be really technical about what you’re doing here, but that’s kinda’ missing the point. I’d say that you would need to scoop out about one-third of the cereal from each box, but hey, it’s your dessert, so do whatever you want with it. Some folks prefer a more Boo Berry-ish mix, while others are all about the Franken Berries. There’s really no wrong way to mix things up, but remember: you are working against the clock as SOON as the first puffed up piece of rice falls into the marshmallowy abyss, so if you ain’t ready to haul ass, you may need to abort the project.

I’m not exaggerating when I say you have less than two minutes to whip your cereal up in the sauce. Any longer, and the marshmallow DNA begins to crust over, and it becomes practically impossible to move your chunks around. This is a two-person job, at the absolute minimum, and as before: egg-beater assistance is HIGHLY recommended here.

Transferring your batter from the pot to a glass container isn’t easy, but there’s a trick to it. The idea is to basically scoop all of the cereal chunks to one side of the pot, so that you create a sort of inclined plane at the bottom of the cookware. This way, you can scrap up the rest of the cereal with a spatula and use that one mound of cereal as a ramp to easily transport your mixture from resting spot A to resting spot B. And in case you are wondering? Yes, washing out marshmallow fragments in cookware IS a real bitch and a half.

From here, you really have two options with your treats. Some people like to dump the things off in the deep freeze for about a half hour, while others prefer to aluminum foil wrap it fro about an hour and a half. Personally, I prefer leaving the things out to congeal at room temperature, but whatever works for you, works for you.

Not surprisingly, it’s just a wee bit difficult to cut up the bars, and the harder they get, obviously, the more unmanageable they become. If you are really dedicated, you could probably saw through them with a butter knife, but that’s the exact verb you will performing - these things are so rocky, you pretty much HAVE to apply as much force as you can to sever them from the mother bar.

I don’t really need to tell you this, but the final products are going to be EXTREMELY messy. Even better, it’s almost impossible to eat the things with a utensil, so it looks like you have no choice but to hop in there with your grubby little meat hooks and splash chocolate cereal chunks and marshmallow webbing all over the place. Not that it’s necessarily a negative experience, of course.

One of the absolute best things about marshmallow squares is that, after they’ve gotten rock solid, they’re actually fairly easy to transport. About two hours after you begin the project, you can easily dump the remainders of the dessert into a freezer bag for safe keeping. And for those of you that like to snack on the same foodstuff for a week? These things, amazingly, manage to maintain their flavor for quite some time, so there are no worries about this stuff going “stale” anytime soon.

As far as the taste of the dish itself…I liked it. Then again, this is coming from a guy that’s spent the last two years making Franken-Food on virtually a weekly basis, so your mileage, most definitely, would vary. None of the cereals really become “dominant” as far as the overall taste of the bars are concerned, and the different textures and flavors, surprisingly, gelled quite well together. All in all, the experiment, more like the Bride of Frankenstein than Franken Berry’s literary inspiration, was a lot more successful than I had imagined.

Odds are, you’re probably going to be participating in a whole lot of Halloween hootenannies and spooky shindigs this season, and if there’s one thing that stands out at a Samhain mixer, it’s probably a huge assed block of differing cereals cobbled together like some sort of undead creature. And as an added bonus, the final product is not only edible, but somewhat yummy, to boot. Unless you have the hands of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, there really isn’t an excuse for you to miss out on this delicious abomination of science - just be sure to lend all of your were-guests non-silver sporks when it comes dessert time, of course.

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My Modest KRAVE CEREAL Reviews

In a glutted cereal market, do Kellogg’s latest products bring anything new to the (breakfast) table?

A few months back, Kellogg’s unveiled a new breakfast cereal called Krave. Actually, the company released two new breakfast cereals simultaneously, with el nuevo product-o coming in dual incarnations - one a chocolate version, and the other, a double-chocolate permutation.

There were a couple of things that initially struck me about this newfangled product, the very least of which was the fact that it kinda’ shared its namesake with a line of gay discos. Was it the embossed cereal chunks on the front of the package, or the fact that the company paid a butt load of money to mass campaign the poop out of the new product, or was it merely the notion that, all in all, there’s really not that much deviation in the cereal aisle stock from month to month? It’s insanely common to see new variations of products in the cereal aisle (the next time you hit up the grocery store, make a mental note of just how many damn varieties of Captain Crunch are being hoisted upon you), but seeing entirely new brands of cereal is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. The breakfast game is one clearly dominated by the old guard, so seeing any form of new blood on the shelving is a sight that’s sure to grab your attention…and make your taste buds just a wee bit curious as a result.

Eventually, consumer curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to recently try out both products. So is Krave destined to be the “next big thing” in America’s pantries, or is it destined to go the way of Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy? Cereal connoisseurs, keep a-reading…

I suppose the first thing to note is that, compositionally, there doesn’t seem to be that much of a difference in the caloric make-up of the two. Granted, the double-chocolate incarnation appears to have a bit more chemical weight to it (which probably explains why it’s expiration date is a month earlier than its uni-chocolate kin), but for the most part, the two items are nutritionally equals.

As far as packaging goes, you’re dealing with the same lingo on both. Clearly, the double-chocolate variety is aesthetically different than the single-chocolate variety, and this is reflected on the packaging for said items. The back panels for each cereal, however, are identical, with Kellogg’s inviting would-be consumers to join the “Krave Nation” (although I’m not really sure if that’s supposed to be a republic of the “democratic” or “constitutional” variety, to be honest.) Also, Kellogg’s makes note of its target audience - “chocovores” - as people that really enjoy themselves some chocolaty breakfast items. Or as other marketers (and most of the laity) are prone to calling them, “diabetics.”

I guess there really isn’t too much to say about the cereal chunks themselves. Obviously, the two are differently hued, and are about the size of one’s thumbnail (pending you’re not part of Andre the Giant’s clan or something). I racked my brain for a few days trying to figure out what these things reminded me of, only to come to the realization that these things bare an uncanny resemblance to those old-ass Skoal Bandit pouches - you know, those mini-tea bags of chewing tobacco that many a crude stereotype can be seen sucking and spitting out on cable television programming, or perhaps your neighborhood’s more rural-looking gas stations. Whether or not that’s something you can overcome while chowing down on this cereal, I am afraid, is something that only the individual can decide for him or herself.

The big selling point for Krave - both varieties, mind you - is that each granule of cereal is loaded with a an inner-chocolate core that makes the cereal interiorly chocolaty as well as exteriorly. The packaging on the front of the cereal makes it sort of look like the chocolate core is almost liquid magma, so for those of you well versed on your Gushers etiquette - well, that may just come in handy once more here.

Before trying the cereal myself, I decided to do a little whole grain biopsy, to see just how chocolaty the inside of each chunk actually was. Since the exterior shell and interior filling of the double chocolate variety are virtually identical in color, it’s pretty hard to tell just how much bang for your buck you are getting there. With the “standard” chocolate variety, however, there is indeed an inner nucleus of chocolate to be found, although I was mighty miffed to note that the chocolate was of a solidified - and not gummy, oozy and Ovaltine-like - nature.

After determining that the foodstuff was most likely edible, I decided to turn on my camera and film my first experience with said product - remember, what you are witnessing is indeed my very first time inviting Krave in my body, and as such, my reaction is one hundred percent undiluted and authentic. “Blair Witch,” this shit ain’t, folks.

On the whole, I would say that Krave is a pretty good cereal, and after digesting both boxes, I reckon I can give you a more comprehensive review of each product.

First off, the “standard” version of Krave actually has a more pronounced chocolaty taste than the double-chocolate variety, which, clearly, is weird as all hell. I think this can be attributed to the fact that, since the standard version has something of a grain-tasting exterior, once you bite into the chunk and get a rush of chocolate, said chocolate flavor is more noticeable than in the double-choc offering, since you really don’t know if you’re chomping down on the outside or inside of the flake.

If you’re eating the cereals side-by-side (or blind-folded), odds are, you probably won’t be able to tell the difference between them for the first couple of bites. Outside of the afore-mentioned pronounced chocolate-ness of the standard offering, the double-choc variety has more of a semi-bitter taste to it. That’s not to say it isn’t sugary or anything (because, dear lord, is it ever), it’s just that it has a sharper flavor than it’s “just-chocolate” sibling. It’s a distinct difference, but it’s not something you would really notice until you’ve gone through half a box of each - and even then, it’s not really that big of a difference between the two.

I really wouldn’t say that one variety is better than the other; if you’re looking for a more “traditional” chocolate cereal, I would go with the standard offering, and if you’re looking for a stronger bowl of cocoa, I’d vouch for the double chocolate blend. In all reality, the gustatorial discrepancies between them are so slight as to be negligible; in fact, if you mix the two into a single bowl and dig in, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which cereal was which - which means that either Kellogg’s is slacking off in the formula department, or they’re making the absolute subtlest statement about the arbitrariness of race relations since “Ikaruga” on the Nintendo Gamecube.

So, at the end of the day, is Krave really worth your time, effort, energies and moolah? While I don’t think the stuff is on the fast track to dethrone Count Chocula anytime soon, it isn’t bad by any stretch, and both varieties have just enough uniqueness to their flavor to make them stand out from the million-billion Rice Crispies/Cocoa Peebles variations out there. All in all, it isn’t going to revolutionize the breakfast aisle in any regard, but if you’re sick of downing oatmeal and off-brand Pop-Tarts every morning, it might just be a pleasant change of pace for those of you seeking something different to stuff into your digestive tracts each morn.

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