Quipu

Kellogg's Unicorn Cereal

Overall Rating: 46

What a sad return to action for poor old Sucrophile.

Image from the Institute collection,
courtesy of Tiger Mountain Studios

Appearance

The first thing that strikes you upon opening the bag is the scent. Or possibly the smell. It's floral and sickly-sweet, like a vanilla orchid has mated with a Triffid. Weirdly enough, after the initial shock has worn off it even smells like a cupcake. Sadly, it's the sort of cupcake you find on the shelves of long-abandoned convenience stores, the sort of cupcake whose ingredients list begins with sugar and then moves on to a long series of polysyllabic polysaccharides and quasi-metabolites. The sort of cupcake whose shelf-life is measured in millennia if not epochs. In shape these are your bog-standard cereal toroids, the debased descendants of the Cheerios of our childhoods. But the colours ... the individual pieces are either a sad dull teal, a sad dull magenta or the saddest, most dull puce. It's like the colours that failed the audition for new Froot Loops. Even worse, the colours don't fade in milk. And what's with those white spots? Kellogg's calls them crunchlets, but they look like mould spores.

Texture and Taste, Dry

There's a bit of character here. We have no idea what the so-called crunchlets are supposed to do, but whatever it is, it's completely blocked by the oaten solidity of the individual pieces themselves. The sugar presents itself fully on first bite, and there's no nasty aftertaste from the artificial cake-frosting flavour. Texture is safe on the gums and there's enough flavour that one could eat a couple hundred ml of the stuff out of the bag without doing oneself a damage. It's nothing to get excited about, though.

Texture and Taste, With Milk

Something peculiar happens when you add milk. Not only does the flavour (what little there is of it) disappear, so does the scent. But the crunch it goeth not, nor doth the colour. So what you wind up with is the hard mouthfeel of a healthy cereal (gasp!) with none of the redeeming vices of a kiddyrot confection. We at the institute cannot remember a time when we have encountered a cereal of any sort that simply bobbed there, like pastel life preservers from a nightmare "Miami Vice" episode, adamantly refusing to absorb any cow-juice. After we'd eaten the test bowl nearly all of the milk remained. We poured another bowl. After that we gave up and just drank the milk.

Conclusion

This is apparently a limited-time offer from Kellogg's. We are properly grateful. And we have to ask: we came out of retirement for this?