It Came From The Grocery Store

So I'm at the Rite Aide last night, looking to score some generic soda pop and maybe a bag of Goldfish, when... like an archaeologist accidentally discovering the lost city of Atlantis underneath a big rock or something... I stumbled upon perhaps the greatest find in the history of junk food shopping. I saw it there on the shelf, glowing like the Ark of the Covenant, melting Nazi faces, and giving me a look that said, "eat me, big boy... you know you want to eat me all up." And I did! I did want to eat them all up! It saw into my very soul, you guys! It's a brand new flavor permutation of my favorite cereal!!! I give you...

!!!Blueberry Muffin Frosted Mini-Wheats!!!



Holy shit! I mean... seriously, c'mon. That's two of my favorite things in one magical box with a cartoon panda on the front trying to sell me a DVD. It's the very personification of the phrase, "say WHAT," and it's presence made me make this face...



...until the Rite Aide manager kicked me out because I was freaking out the other shoppers. I may have also peed myself a little bit (a lot, actually) but that's beside the point. We have a new flavor of Mini-Wheats, yo! It is an exciting time to be alive in the Western world. So let's muscle this bad boy open. First, the smell test...



Well, there's certainly notes of blueberry muffin-ness. But, not like, blueberry muffins straight out of the oven at your loving grandmother's house on a rainy Saturday. No, more like... and, of course, this isn't much of a shock... blueberry muffins that were made out of old dodgeballs and car floor mats and other synthetic materials in a lab somewhere in New Jersey. You can smell something that's quite near to blueberries, and you can smell something that could very well be described as "muffin-like," but the two are just a few steps away from being like the real thing, kind of like the replicants in Blade Runner. Again, I would expect nothing less from a mass-produced kid-oriented cereal, but still. Not super enticing.

Now, the look...



It's kind of hard to tell because of the light from my computer monitor, but they're the normal bale-of-hay style of Mini-Wheat, but the frosting on them is a pale purple, almost a lavender. It's a color that wouldn't look out of place in a Jane Austen novel, or in the bathroom decorative soaps that your aunt always has that you're not sure if you're supposed to actually use so you end up just washing your hands with water which doesn't really get them clean but you're okay with that because what if you use the decorative soaps and then you get yelled at for destroying something all Martha Stewart-y and you never get invited back again. Your aunt always has good ham and you don't want to fuck up your chances at getting in on that.

But, yeah, the cereal is light purple. Which isn't a color you see a lot of these days in the world of cereal; usually it's all POW reds and KABLAM blues and ZOWIEEEE yellows. Something to distract the kids from the fact that they're eating ultra-sugared cardboard shavings and ground-up animal bones in milk.

Anyway...

So the big question, I guess... the one we have yet to answer... is how do the Blueberry Muffin Frosted Mini-Wheats taste? Surprisingly, not that bad...

I mean, they're not going to give your aforementioned grandmother's blueberry muffins a run for their money or anything... in fact, discounting the smell, they don't really even taste all that much like their stated flavor. They're very sweet (obvs) but the shredded wheat cuts that a little bit, and they're kind of plastic-ish like you're licking a spork, but overall they're much more subtle and mild tasting than you'd expect. You don't feel like your sinuses have been packed with muffin batter or anything like that. They're not cloying. They're not bad. They're not particularly in the same room with blueberry muffins, either (again, obvs), but... you know... a bowlful of these in the morning isn't going to hurt you any, or make you feel like you just ate Pixie Stix and hard candy pieces in maple syrup like with other cereals.

Overall... edible, but not cravable. Not amazing. I didn't see the Way and the Light in their ugly purple-blue box like I sorta kinda thought I would, but whatever. Brand name permutations are always just retardedly fun! Variety!!!