Snack Review: Captain Crunch’s Cotton Candy Crunch Cereal
I may be a little late to the bandwagon with this cereal. It was released last summer, but for some reason I’m only seeing it sold in stores now. Perhaps it just took a while for it to become available on a wider scale. It could also be a seasonal cereal, though I can’t find any confirmation of that. In any case, it’s currently being sold almost everywhere in my hometown.
This cereal is technically a variant of Oops! All Berries, but with a cotton candy flavor and color scheme.The flavor is authentic to cotton candy, or as close as you can get with a corn and oat based cereal. I’ve worked in a cotton candy store and made tons of it, so you can trust me when I say it gets the flavor right. It’s got that super-sugary caramelized taste perfectly captured, without the weird fruit flavors that lesser cotton candy flavored treats fall back on. It’s almost too sugary to be a cereal, it really feels like you’ve just eaten a bowl full of cotton candy for breakfast. It has undertones of oat, but they complement the sugar. The best part is the texture. Crunch berries are already powery and remain extremely crunchy and dry in milk, which in this case mimics the dryness of cotton candy and the way it dissolves into powder in your mouth. The cotton candy flavor actually works surprisingly well on cereal, I’d give it a 5/5 in the flavor department for tasting exactly how it claims to taste.
Appearance-wise, Cotton Candy Crunch doesn’t exactly live up to the image on the box. In person the colors look a little bit grey and washed out. I think this is because the blue and pink colors have mixed with each other a little. There are individual bits of cereal that have splotches of the opposite color on them, and a handful of them are even purple from the two colors mixing too much. Still, it’s nice to see more pastel colors in cereal, and they still look incredibly whimsical.
I can’t talk about cereal without taking a moment to talk about the box as well. The box of Cotton Candy Crunch is gorgeous.The whole thing is mostly pink and blue, with a subtle amusement park theme. The back has an assortment of little puzzles with some colorful art. I love how well-themed the whole box is to the concept that cotton candy is amusement park food.
All in all this cereal lives up to expectations. It’s only drawback is that it’s only cotton candy flavored, without any other flavors of cereal mixed in to balance out all the sweetness. Because of this I like to mix it with other foods. I’ve had it with other cereals, with blueberries, and on top of ice cream, the last of which I strongly recommend. Sugary cereal and ice cream secretly go really well together.
