REVIEW: Kellogg’s Special K Fudge Brownie Bites

Special K Fudge Brownie Bites

Sometimes you’re waiting at the ATM or buying a plunger or watching movers carry a divan into the lobby of an apartment complex and a brownie craving just plum rises out of the Earth’s crust, willing and ready to swallow you in a single gulp, and there you sit, defenses bare, without a bakery, grocery, or Easy Bake Oven in sight. What’re you to do?

Fret not, dear reader, for the hope of relief rests in sight, and it cometh in the form of a 0.74-ounce purple baggie.

Saturday was an exciting day: we survived the Mayan apocalypse, dodged a passing asteroid, and lived to see another National Haiku Day (and what’s more fun than short poetic verse??). In hopes to celebrate all these wonders in a fiscally realistic economic exchange, I skipped-the-doo-da-day down to the local supercenter and found these new-fangled Special K Fudge Brownie Bites.

Prior to opening my factory-sealed satchel, I noticed the special emphasis Mr. Kellogg stamped on the portion represented here.

Hmmm…

Considering the amount of Photoshopping that went in to that picture, I visualized myself opening the bag to find two, maybe three, dinky brownie nubs that would more likely than not remind me of hamster food. Nonetheless, I closed my eyes and reached in…

“Como?!” I uttered under my breath.

These were not the brownie shrapnel I feared. Quite the contrary, they were chewy without a wisp of a factory-sealed grease coating in sight. I was so surprised by my spontaneous bout into brownie-inspired Spanish expression that I had to try another.

And another.

And another.

Ten anothers later, I realized I had eaten the whole bag. After conducting an in-depth psychological analysis and setting my results against years of previous research, I am proud to conclude that these are, indeed, fudge-like in texture, which is an accomplishment in any regard. It got me thinking, “Gee willikers, I wish there were a superhero made of brownies.”

Luckily, I had five more bags of these, so I made one.

Special K Fudge Brownie Bites Brownie Man

Indeed, his name is Brownie Man. He has a theme song:

Brownie Man, Brownie Man
Quicker than
A minivan
Not Raisin Bran
Or made of flan
He’s Brownie Man.

Special K Fudge Brownie Bites  Brownie Man Saves the Day!

One of Brownie Man’s greatest strengths is his convenience. The compact size of these nifty little pouches leads me to believe I could take these brownies just about anywhere. To the hardware store. In a submarine. Lumberjacking through the dense Canadian woods. In fact, due to the compact size and easy disposal, I’m about 87 percent sure they would make excellent space food.

Special K Fudge Brownie Bites Brownies in Space!

Of course, if you’re not a lumberjack or deep-space explorer, I am pleased to announce how excellently these fit in a lunchbox.

Sometimes, I crave a homemade, straight-out-of-the-oven brownie filled with milk chocolate chips that, when pulled, form molten lava ribbons. Other times, I covet a simple, no-fuss brownie that comes in a cellophane bag and requires absolutely no effort other than rip, pluck, and chew. These Brownie Bites fulfill the second.

That said, texture reigns far over flavor here. If you find yourself with a hardcore, exclusive-batch, better-than-the-original-Star-Wars brownie craving, these may not fulfill your inner needs (and, really, what can when talking about the original Star Wars?), but, for those who are just looking for a chewy packaged brownie or, if you’re like me and missing those Hostess Brownie Bites (oh, lonely Hostess, where has your pastry magic gone?!), these are a rainbow of light, guiding the map to a chewy treasure.

Special K Fudge Brownie Bites Brownie Brick Road

So follow the brownie brick road.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 bag – 100 calories, 40 calories from fat, 4 grams of fat, 1.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 60 milligrams of sodium, 14 grams of carbohydrates, Less than 1 gram of dietary fiber, 7 grams of sugars, and 1 gram of protein..)

Item: Kellogg’s Special K Fudge Brownie Bites
Purchased Price: $2.50
Size: 1 box/6 pouches
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Soft. Chewy. Lots of little brownies per bag. Lumberjacks. Spontaneous Spanish expressions of delight. Surviving the apocalypse. Space explorers. Haikus.
Cons: Faint on the chocolate flavor. Excessive photoshopping. Not having an Easy Bake Oven when you need one. Buying a plunger.

REVIEW: Special K Ham, Egg & Pepper Jack Cheese Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich

Special K Flatbread

It pretty much goes without saying that meat, egg, and cheese form the triumvirate of breakfast deliciousness in the grab-and-go world. It also goes without saying that this trinity of cholesterol, fat, and sodium will pretty much kill you if you eat too much of it and sit on your butt all day.

That is, unless you serve it up within the familiar packaging of Special K, which wants to rewards that hard butt-sitting at the office with a breakfast sandwich to keep you going without sending you into cardiac arrest.

There are a few things I give Special K the benefit of the doubt with. Cereal, obviously, is one of them. Making my girlfriend attempt contortionist yoga moves while pouring milk onto said cereal while wiggling into those skinny jeans would also be up there. Crafting a healthy breakfast sandwich that doesn’t taste rubbery or flavorless (here’s looking at you, Dunkin Donuts) isn’t.

That being said, I have an unhealthy and unrealistic expectation of box art on new grocery products and not a lot of time to spare for making breakfast in the morning, so I willingly stepped to the plate when it came to buying Special K’s new Flatbread Breakfast Sandwiches.

They must have been selling like hotcakes because there were only a few boxes of the Ham, Egg and Pepper Jack Flatbreads left on the morning I stopped by the store. If they tasted half as good as hotcakes, I might be inclined to make a joke about how I’d be on a fast track to becoming a fat dude. Except, since each flatbread is only 200 calories and packs 12 grams of protein, I guess I’d be on a fast track to being one skinny dude, which I already am.

Special K Flatbread Instructions

Regular readers now know I’ve lived up to the stereotype about men and our inability to follow directions. However, in this case I followed the directions to a tee, right on down to microwaving my sandwich on a paper towel for 1 minute and 15 seconds and then letting it rest for one minute to ensure “even heating.” I followed the directions so closely that had I considered myself a child, I would have made sure to Skype my parents and have them supervise me.

Special K Flatbread Ooze

Special K Flatbread Cheese

After 2 minutes and 15 seconds my previously hard as a hockey puck flatbread had become warm and, to my utter bewilderment, slightly toasty. Worried the microwave process would render the bread component flimsy and soggy was a fear of mine going in, but aside from one spot where the cheese had overflowed to the side, the sandwich emerged almost as if it had a round at the number two setting in the toaster. Speaking of that cheese to the side deal, would it kill Special K to position the cheese to the middle? There’s not a lot of pepper jack to begin with, and having a sixth of my puny slice fed to the paper towel wasn’t, as the kids say, cool.

Special K Flatbread Side

Special K Flatbread Egg

The sandwich itself isn’t half bad. Wow, I can’t believe I actually wrote that. Obviously it’s small, but the the eggs have a slightly buttery and salty flavor, with the cheese adding a really good, milky, and fatty richness that has all the melty goo and backheat you’d expect from pepper jack. Even the flatbread had a nice honey-oat flavor, which added a little sweetness and wholesomeness to the otherwise salty-heat of the eggs and cheese.

Special K Flatbread Ham

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. The cheese lacks the coverage needed to goo-ify the entire sandwich, while the ham is dry and a bit chewy. Oh yea, did I mention that it was salty? Low calorie it might be, but with 30 percent of the RDA for salt (based on a 2,000 calorie diet) it’s not going to do your blood pressure any flavors. As much as I liked the pepper jack, the sandwich screams for a little sweetness, while a salsa component that adds tomatoes would go a long way to pushing a southwestern flavor profile.

I’m not willing start giving Special K the benefit of the doubt on other crap like chicken nuggets and french fries, but for the crowd who’ve been staring at those skinny jeans or just looking to mix-up the breakfast routine with a heated component, I admit these breakfast flatbreads could be a big hit. The texture isn’t bad at all for something that starts out in your freezer, and it definitely doesn’t taste like it’s low calorie. Still, a few minor tweaks would have gone a long way to making these way tastier, and maybe even a semi-regular buy for those of us not looking to add a few new yoga moves.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 flatbread – 200 calories, 70 calories from fat, 8 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 100 milligrams of cholesterol, 730 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, 20 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of fiber, 3 grams of sugar, 12 grams of protein, and 20% calcium)

Item: Special K Ham, Egg & Pepper Jack Cheese Flatbread Breakfast Sandwich
Purchased Price: $4.99
Size: 4 flatbreads
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Cheese melts up nicely and has great milky flavor with spicy backheat. Flatbread maintains toasty texture with honey-oat taste. Eggs have buttery flavor. Ham is smoky. Tastier than Dunkin Donuts’ egg white flatbreads. Only 200 calories per sandwich. Reading directions. New yoga props.
Cons: Small. Tiny. Puny. Minuscule. Not recommended if you’re a grown man. Cheese doesn’t get full coverage over the egg. Ham is dry and chewy. Could use some kind of sweetness or relief. Saltier than the Dead Sea.

REVIEW: Kellogg’s Special K Popcorn Chips (Butter & Sweet and Salty)

Special K Popcorn Chips

I had to call my cable company regarding some serious internet connectivity issues over the weekend. For those of you who have ever had the misfortune of having to contact your cable provider for any reason, I don’t have to tell you that it was a long, tedious process, fraught with drama. There was shouting, pleading, whining, and some profanity, and that was before I even spoke to a person. The automated system kept misinterpreting my voice commands, putting me on hold, and then kicking me out to the main menu in an endless loop of broken promises.

What kept me sane in those terrible moments before I finally broke through to an actual human being? Some crispy, corn-based snacks in the form of geometric shapes. Special K’s new Popcorn Chips are crunchy baked snacks that taste like tortilla chips but look like Styrofoam triangles. And they are the one thing that kept me from crossing completely over from blissful, crunchy serenity waiting on hold for 20 minutes to completely losing my shit on some innocent customer service representative who probably hates their job as much as I hate their company’s chirpy, ad-filled phone queue soundtrack.

Special K Popcorn Chips are made from corn (natch), and they taste like it. However, I never got the sensation of eating popcorn. It was more like I was eating tortilla chips. By referring to these thingies as “Popcorn Chips,” Special K may have wanted to emphasize how their snacks are baked and are similar in texture to Pop Chips. Like Pop Chips, Special K Popcorn Chips are low in fat and present a healthier option for those in need of a crunchy, convenient snack. Unlike Pop Chips, they have no association with Ashton Kutcher. See? Special K Popcorn Chips are already winning at life. They also appear thick enough to withstand some dipping as well, so if you’re curious as to whether a Popcorn Chip mixes with ranch dressing or nacho cheese and don’t care about fat, have at it.

Special K Popcorn Chips Closeup

I sampled two flavors of Special K Popcorn Chips: “Sweet and Salty” and “Butter.” Sweet and Salty was the chip flavor that kept me from crossing over into the Danger Zone during my telephone adventure. They’re very lightly sweetened, which makes their flavor profile a bit more complex than I first expected it to be. The sweetness mingles nicely with the saltiness, which provides a pleasantly addictive snacking experience. It makes me glad a single serving size of these Popcorn Chips is 28 chips and not something more restrictive and ridiculous like 10. But let’s not kid ourselves, I could totally go to town on these and eat half the box. What can I say? I like crunchy snacks… especially if the crunching drowns out the umpteenth repetition of some perky bimbo’s invitation to ask my customer service agent for more information on bundling telephone service with HD cable and high-speed internet.

The butter-flavored Special K Popcorn Chips, on the other hand, are actually pretty nasty. Special K… if you’re going to go so far as to create a corn snack reminiscent of POPCORN, you really need to hit the mark with the BUTTER-FLAVORED ones. It’s not rocket science. Just use the fake butter everyone else uses on microwave popcorn. Duh. The disturbingly rank artificial butter flavoring is so strong that it comes off tasting more like fake cheese than butter. And I don’t mean the good fake cheese. This is terrible fake cheese. Like the kind that comes in off-brand, plastic dip cups with stale cracker sticks, which would somehow always be lurking in the office break room at the bottom of the kitchen “snack bowl”… dusty and ignored for what seems like centuries. I’m so glad I didn’t try the Butter Popcorn Chips while on the phone. You’d all have heard about the first-ever long-distance throttling via fiber-optics on the morning news. A real triumph of science. For me, not for the cable company.

Special K Popcorn Chips Single Chip

The Butter Popcorn Chips don’t look all that differently from the Sweet and Salty ones, but you can actually see the fine dusting of “butter” seasoning on each chip. The inherent popcorn flavor of the Butter Popcorn Chips is overpowered by the funky fake cheese flavoring, so I can’t help but wish that they’d toned it down a bit. I don’t know what kind of butter they were thinking about when they created this variety, but it was probably left out in the sun for a while. It tastes like a foot. The butter’s gone bad.

Special K Popcorn Chips are crunchy and flavorful. It’s just too bad that only one flavor is good. They made a serious error with the Butter Popcorn Chips, but I’m not about to give them a call to complain about it. At least not without the Sweet and Salty Popcorn Chips within snacking distance.

(Nutrition Facts – 28 chips (28g) – Butter – 120 calories, 2 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 22 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, less than 1 gram of sugar, and 2 grams of protein. Sweet and Salty – 120 calories, 2.5 grams of fat, 2.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 105 milligrams of sodium, 23 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, 2 grams of sugar, and 2 grams of protein.)

Item: Kellogg’s Special K Popcorn Chips (Butter & Sweet and Salty)
Purchased Price: $2.89
Size: 4.5 ounces
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 4 out of 10 (Butter)
Rating: 8 out of 10 (Sweet and Salty)
Pros: “Sweet and Salty” lives up to its name. Nice crisp texture. Decent serving size. Low in fat.
Cons: Butter flavor is extremely artificial-tasting and gross. Foot-flavored snacks. Waiting on hold. Ashton.

REVIEW: Special K Pastry Crisps (Chocolatey Delight and Brown Sugar Cinnamon)

Special K Pastry Crisps (Chocolatey Delight and Brown Sugar Cinnamon)

I’m not going to lie. Being a 23-year-old dude does come with a certain amount of biological advantages. Chief among these, of course, is a metabolism fast enough it outrace the Millennium Falcon on the Kessel Run and still have time for a bathroom stop. Twelve parsecs? Please. I burn through Twinkies in ten.

Having said metabolism affords me quite a few liberties when wandering through Walmart. Endcaps and register lanes offering 99-cent fruit pies and bagged chips are child’s play for my appetite, which instead often leads me to entire family-size bags of potato chips and cookies. Now, I realize these little jaunts into junk food bliss will eventually take their toll on me, and in an effort to stave off the advent of full man-boobage development and male pattern baldness, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least peek into what any future “diet” might entail.

There are, of course, many options. The Paleo Diet and Atkins Diet are especially attractive to my inner sense of wannabe-machismo, but who am I kidding, I could never give up on the worthless carbs of packaged snacks. That brings up the intriguing option of Fiber One, if only for the shameful premise that eating 7,000 percent of my daily RDA in fake fiber wouldn’t endear me to my co-workers. With these options crossed off the list, I rounded the cereal aisle at Walmart thinking that my experiment in semi-healthy eating wasn’t going to happen. That’s when they hit me. Or rather, I hit them, thanks to dodging an aisle clearing drag race of old people in electric scooters. That’s right friends, Special K.

I have no idea what the “K” stands for in Special K (potassium?), and after more than a decade of eschewing their products, I still have no idea what makes them so special. But when finding myself suddenly facing the new Chocolatey Delight and Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pastry Crisps, I decided to take a little trip into the future and see if the coming years of man-boobage can be staved off with a little help from what looked to be a Pop-Tart in disguise.

I have good news and I have bad news. The bad news is I’m probably going to get man-boobs no matter what. The good news is that the new Special K Pastry Crisps will help me slow that ineluctable fate one portion controlled wrapper at a time.

Special K Chocolatey Delight Pastry Crisps Outtards

The Chocolatey Delight crisps taste somewhere between a chocolate fudge Pop-Tart and a Keebler Fudge Stripe cookie. There’s a pronounced shortbread crisp which lacks the heavy and dull wheat snack bread like crusts of a Pop-Tart, while a lickable portion of chocolatey “icing” provides added sweetness and pronounced cocoa flavor. Is it chocolate? I don’t know for sure, but it’s chocolatey, and hey, we’re not eating for man boobs, remember?

Special K Chocolatey Delight Pastry Crisps Innards

In any case, there’s enough of the sweet glycerin-based filling to keep each bite interesting and moist, and despite the relatively small size, I find myself preferring the crumbly morsels and sweet “crisp” to any ambiguously flavored chocolate Pop-Tart I’ve had in the past. My only complaint is that each wrapper contains two very small pastries. We’re talking slightly larger than a baseball card here and less than a half ounce each, so probably no more than a few man-chomps for a crisp.

Special K Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pastry Crisps Innards

The Brown Sugar Cinnamon flavor isn’t as good, although the smell alone makes it worth buying. It’s that intensely rich, buttery cinnamon sugar spread smell that wafts through malls across these here United States thanks to the Cinnabon franchise. A light drizzle of sweet icing won’t fool even the most diet-food inoculated eaters into thinking it could actually pass for cream cheese icing, but it adds a nice touch to the otherwise crispy pastry.

Special K Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pastry Crisps Wrapper

The taste is standard as far as brown sugar cinnamon goes, with a little extra emphasis on the cinnamon. Nothing life-changing, but at 100 calories per two pastries, one can’t set his sights that high. Again, my only complaint is the size, and in this case, the amount of cinnamon-sugar “goo.” The paste actually has a nice consistency, but it’s tough to appreciate when a scant teaspoon or so fills the shell.

I’m not going to lie. Buying a pack of Special K Pastry Crisps isn’t the most masculine thing I’ve done in the past week. But I can live with that. Just as a I can live with a slow metabolism when I get older, provided Special K continue to disguise Pop-Tarts in the guise of 100-calorie pack Pastry Crisps. Until then though, it’s full steam ahead down the cookie aisle, provided the scooter drag races don’t take me out first.

(Nutrition Facts – 2 crisps – 100 calories, 20 calories from fat, 2 grams of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat, 0 grams to trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 80 milligrams of sodium, 25 milligrams of potassium, 20 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, 7 grams of sugar, and 1 gram of protein.)

Item: Special K Pastry Crisps (Chocolatey Delight and Brown Sugar Cinnamon)
Price: $2.54
Size: 5 pack
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 8 out of 10 (Chocolatey Delight)
Rating: 6 out of 10 (Brown Sugar Cinnamon)
Pros: Filling tastes just as good as a Pop-Tart. Chocolatey Delight reminds me of a Keebler cookie. No lame edges. No hydrogenated oils. Icing drizzle provides extra sweetness. Smells great. No toaster required. Portion control. Avoiding man boobs.
Cons: Small, very small. Not real chocolate. Needs more gooey filling. Icing could use more pronounced flavor. Avoiding death by electric scooter at Walmart. A future with a slow metabolism.

REVIEW: Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal

Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal

I’m going to be honest, this may be the healthiest cereal I’ve ever eaten. As a rule, I eat breakfast cereals developed by dentists who could really use some help but don’t like asking for handouts. The least sugary cereal I’ve eaten in years is Honey Nut Cheerios, which is kind of like bragging that you only smoke two packs of filtered cigarettes a day. Hell, the product I reviewed for my TIB application was Post Marshmallow Pebbles; that cost me three teeth and my eyesight for about an hour, but it was worth it! Now here I am at the opposite end of the spectrum. I can only assume that Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal will resurrect my hairline, bestow 20/20 vision, and give me muscles in places I haven’t had them since college. Frankly, anything less will be a bigger disappointment than watching the edited-for-TV version of The Breakfast Club. (“Forget you! No dad, what about you?”)

The first thing I notice about Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal is that the box actually looks like something an adult might eat. There’s nary a spunky cartoon character or anthropomorphic animal to be found, and I’m kind of freaked out that the back of the box just has pictures of the ingredients and a dead-eyed model pretending to eat some while thinking, “It was this or underwear modeling in the Costco circular,” rather than a word search or jumble. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to hone my vocab skills while eating, but I guess that’s the choice you make — healthy or smart. One of the informative blurbs gives a good idea of the target audience by claiming that women who eat a cereal breakfast like this one weigh less, which just does wonders for my masculinity, let me tell you. When I go back to the store for another box, I think I’ll grab some yogurt smoothies and a package of Secret, which I understand to be made for women but strong enough for me.

Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal Closeup

Pouring some out in a bowl increases my confidence that, if I don’t actually LIKE this cereal, I’ll at least find it tolerable. I’m a little bummed that the flakes aren’t shaped like bats or C3PO faces or some shit, but I guess that wouldn’t do when you’re marketing yourself to people with “jobs” and “401Ks” and “relationships, as long as he keeps his hands off that tramp Jenny from Accounting.” Anyway, if the flakes look bland, they at least don’t appear actively offensive. There are also plenty of oats, and hey, oatmeal’s okay. Nobody ever said “Yippee, oatmeal!” if there wasn’t going to be brown sugar in it, but it’s pretty hard to work up any actual dislike for oats, in meal form or otherwise. The honey isn’t visible to the naked eye, but if it’s not in there, I promise you somebody’s getting a strongly worded letter on Monday.

Actually, for all my hesitance, Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal really doesn’t taste bad. Anyone who hasn’t been shoveling spoonfuls of cavity bombs into their maw for the last two decades is likely to find it within spitting distance of “good.” The taste is definitely more on the understated side — there’s only so much honey they can add to this stuff and still market it as “healthy” — but it beats dumping a handful of sugar on regular Cheerios, which is what I used to do as a kid (and now) when we’d run out of the good cereals. The honey flavor definitely comes through, as do the oats, and the flakes retain their crunchiness fairly well in milk. I can’t say this is what I’d choose every trip to the store, but as a compromise between teeth-rotting rapture and bland antiques like Wheaties or Shredded Wheat, you could do a lot worse.

(Nutrition Facts — 2/3 cup — 100 calories, 0.5 grams of fat, 0 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 140 milligrams of sodium, 70 milligrams of potassium, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of dietary fiber, 8 grams of sugar, 14 grams of other carbohydrates, and 2 grams of protein.)

Item: Special K Multigrain Oats & Honey Cereal
Price: $3.69
Size: 13.6 ounces
Purchased at: Giant
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Strong enough for a man. Helps me fit into skinny jeans. Feeling like an adult. Does not make my teeth weep. Fairly tasty.
Cons: Putting dentists out of business. No fun shapes. Made testicles shrink. Not improving vocab. Did not restore hair or vision. Edited-for-TV movies.