CHRIS REVIEWS: Girl Scout Cereals

I'm going to start reviewing stuff. Disclaimer: I offer no explanations and do not guarantee results or accuracy. I am an expert in nothing, except, perhaps milkshakes and additional ways to use RAIN-X.

Let's move on.  Today's review is GIRL SCOUT COOKIE CEREAL. I know what you're thinking, "Who, in the world, NEEDS Girl Scout cookies for breakfast?" That is a fair question. "Especially in cereal form, when you could just eat Girl Scout: the cookie, like our ancestors did?"

Today, we will attempt to answer these questions. There are two types of cereal I've come across: Thin Mint and the Caramel/Coconut one that isn't called a Samoa Cereal, which is upsetting to both The Ancient Ones and six year old children who can't read well and don't know what caramel means. Points lost there.  Let's begin with the Not Samoa Cereal.

Scientists worked tirelessly to create this Frankenstein's monster, built with the mind of a cookie and the body of a nick-nack of a breakfast bit. It's certainly shaped vaguely like a Samoa - in that it's donut shaped. In fact, it looks incredibly like a donut, especially since it doesn't have any of the amazing texture of a Samoa, a revelation whose mileage may vary depending on the degree of wanton love you have for coconut flakes. It actually takes a way a bit of the look of these torus treats. They no longer look like a portal Stephen Strange is opening to the mirror world, as they should. Instead, they look like a sad inflatable children's raft in fear of the fully grown 165 pound adult bottom rapidly approaching it in the pool. In short: cereal. it looks like breakfast cereal. That's fine. I did not expect these to appear in the form of abstract art crafted by an artisan chef made with the finest chocolates harvested from seeds picked by goats fed on a diet of the finest skittles and kale and carved with a knife sharp enough to cut through a shoe. It's breakfast cereal. If you can see clearly at 6 AM to 8 AM, the hours for which these were designed to be consumed, you aren't living your best life and you should immediately engage in some athletic, outgoing adventure that stretches your body to the limits and expands your mind, or possibly beer.

So now that we've established that the way it looks doesn't matter, mostly because there really isn't anything to it anyway, let's turn to what does - THE TASTE. How does it taste? First order of business? Dry cereal. I tossed a handful of Not Samoas into my mouth. Knee jerk reaction: They taste of corn, like a very mild version of Smacks, but immediately after that, some caramel, followed by a bit of chocolate. If you cross your legs, meditate, and reach a higher plane of focus, you can detect a smattering of coconut, almost as if hints of the brown hairy beach rock have escaped the floaty cereal bits and reached up to tickle your nose, more of a reminder than than a flavor.

In general, I found this experience pleasant, especially because sugar. It wasn't exceptional, but it was sort of fun. Things changed a little as I crunched into them, however - they are pretty damn crunchy, and did cause some minor wear and tear on the parts of my mouth closest to my teeth. Mind you, they aren't Captain Crunch bad; I doubt the roof of my mouth looks like a car window after it's been smashed by baseball sized hail; I'd say it's more akin to the bruising you'd receive if forty golf balls were dropped on you from 3 feet up* - not awesome, but certainly manageable.

But let's talk milk - surely a sweet, delicious liquid associated with breakfast and, indeed, considered a key ingredient in this mix must have an effect. It certainly makes the circles stand out more, and the milk makes the color and contrast stand out a lot more, which is actually pretty nice!

Indeed, milk helps all things. Firstly, it softens the crunchy pastry bagels into something a bit more balanced, and more importantly, it reduces the flavor of the corn, which is really key. When I think breakfast, I do not want to think of a vegetable stick with millions of delicious yellow boils on it's skin. I probably don't want to think about that at dinner either, but at breakfast, I just want the engine to warm up enough to get my ass to work. Strangely enough, cool milk helps with that, drastically diminishing corn flavor to nearly nothing.

In conclusion to Part 1: Caramel Preserver, I'd say give them a try, enjoy with friends as a breakfast tasting experience. Combine with bacon, orange juice, and a pear. Not bananas: bananas and this cereal have opposing star signs and are too passionate to really love each other. Are they as good as the cookies? No. If you had to chose between ONLY eating the cookies for breakfast OR the cereal, cookies, maybe warmed for a WEE bit in a toaster oven, with a bit of milk.

Moving on, let's discuss THIN MINT CEREAL. Obviously, of all the Girl Scout cookies, Thin Mints are the most prominent. They're the staple. They're the bread and butter of Girl Scout cookies. When you buy Girl Scout cookies, you're really buying Thin Mints + some other good cookie. You have to have the Thin Mints. If they don't have Thin Mints, I question whether I REALLY need Girl Scout cookies at all. This is an immutable law of nature, like the toilet seat always being in the opposite position of where you need it, always.

So, holding this cereal bit very close to my eyeball, I can immediately tell you that its design is superior, and not just because THIN MINT(!).  It's coated with a chocolate powder and has a strong chocolate & mint smell. Almost, but not quite, like the cookie. Impressively, its shaped like a flying saucer, an alien UFO that decided that mudding in Louisiana would be fun, and that maybe Earth might be OK after all. It looks like a a sleek outer space ship reflecting the darkness of space, or 1990's Honda civic a high school kid has painted with that matte-black paint to create the illusion of speed "because," he thinks, "girls like that sort of thing."

The handful of these is quite a rush. They actually have a gritty cocoa feel to them, as if the powder is just a bit raw and unrefined, yet somehow still smooth. They feel sort of like high end stockings made from interwoven cocoa fibers, then crushed up into a powdery mist and wrapped around a breakfast cereal disc. And in the mouth, they are quite good! They taste very close to Thin Mints, and the texture comes along for the ride. If a thin mint left the station traveling at 120 miles per hour, 13 miles away, and Crispix flavored Cheerio left another station heading towards the thin mint at 65 miles per hour, they would collide at precisely the point where your imagination would tell you they would - or at least where mine would. Your trains may travel at different speeds, however they will still be constrained by the terrestrial physics of our world, meaning you will most probably find that my imagined collision point is *PROBABLY* not to far from yours.

These things really shine in milk. No, not literally. They're dusted in a fine chocolate/mint coating that resembles street dirt mixed with the soot of a burnt out hickory log. But they do stick out - they're actually pretty to look at as small black holes in a white void of your bowl's milky way! Texture here is slightly tougher than typical cereal, but still in the pretty good to good category! These are actually fun to eat! The first bite will probably shock you, because I, nor anybody else, associates mint with breakfast. I associate mint with tooth brushing, drinking too much coffee, and meetings at tables that are smaller than they should be. Mint is delicious, but mint is fraught with anxiety. Mint is cooling, and is best served cold. Like ice cream. Not surprisingly, the cooling milk helps remove some of the anxiety from the cereal. Generally, cookie is far enough away from mint breath management to assuage some of those worries, but milk, in a pinch, seems to have done wonders as well.

Verdict: Thin Mint Cereal is actually pretty good! Warning: DO NOT PAIR WITH ORANGE JUICE. I'd suggest a toast with butter and jam and maybe grilled chicken, seasoned with thyme, rosemary, a TINY BIT of cinnamon, and a bit of lemon or lime juice. Word to the wise: your teeth will look like you ate the heart out of an evil sorcerer, but your lips will taste of confidence, Christmas, and the thrilling feeling associated with childhood memories of stealing cookies you weren't supposed to have until after dinner - an almost naughty fun-ness. Then you'll look down, and probably think, "this is just breakfast cereal."

Solution: add beer to breakfast and serve with friends. You'll have a blast. I'd suggest a coconut/coffee porter. Drink 24 ounces of that dark, rich beer, then 2 glasses of water and a bagel, then go to town on these cereals with friends after a sleepover. Finish with a strong cup of tea and a toast square with jam. You'll start your morning as right as the mail.

*I will neither confirm nor deny direct knowledge of this statement.