I have a bit of an obsession with breakfast cereal. I'm not exactly sure when it started, but ever since I've been able to mostly choose my own meals unfettered by society's expectations (read: college), I rejoined the breakfast cereal community with a gusto. While my first love will always be the sugary desserts as breakfast cereals of my tender youth, I occasionally foray into adult-oriented cereals that try and be "hip and cool" to appeal to a younger generation. Today's subject is one such cereal, with a seasonal twist. Let's explore the world of Pumpkin Spice Frosted Mini-Wheats.
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| Super classy. You can tell by the lack of cartoon anthropomorphic cereal. |
Shredded Wheat is not a cereal that kids will clamor for, really. In it's purest form (I believe only sold by Post these days) it generally resembles a hay bale, neatly crimped, that sits in your bowl. It is of a fairly large size, with 2 bales filling the average bowl. While the novelty of "giant cereal pieces" is intriguing at first, it quickly fades given the flavor of the cereal, which is decidedly "meh". Corn Flakes have more flavor, is what I'm saying. Kellogg's, after some interesting patent litigation, came out with a more kid-friendly variety, the Frosted Mini-Wheat, which touts much smaller cereal pieces, frosting, which is always a good sign, and some vague notion of being "more healthy" than the usual honey blasted sugar bombs that most kids oriented cereal consists of. Take a look!
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| Shhhh...it can sense fear. |
Well, it is certainly cereal. I've always been a fan of Frosted Mini-Wheats as a concept, though I tend to get sick of them faster than other, more comforting cereals. How does this particular variety stack up? Well, it certainly has something "spice-ish" and "vaguely pumpkin-ish" about its scent. The frosting also has orange highlights, which is a nice touch for the presentation, but really, this stuff is always going to look like tiny hay bales to me. The taste is "wheat and frosting, but with added....something". It is a really vague flavor that kind of hints at maybe having been exposed to pumpkin like elements at some point in the manufacturing process, along with something that maybe is a spice accidentally added to the batch. The cereal pieces are uncommonly dry without milk, so much so that I do not really recommend eating this dry, but with milk they taste pretty good, but it's not really pumpkin spice so much as "not standard frosting". It is a mystery wrapped in wheat fibers coated with known unknowns.
On the FACE Rating System, I give this 0 faces. It's not bad, and the flavor is pretty decent, but it is so confusing trying to figure out exactly what that flavor is beyond "sweet mystery". If you like Frosted Mini-Wheats, you might give it a try, but as a first Mini-Wheat endeavor I simply cannot recommend it. Without a frame of reference, one may just end up even more confused than I was.
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