Sugar bowl.

So today we memorialize our New Year's Resolutions with an entry all about stuff with sugar in it. Farewell, resolutions! Hello, sweet, sweet taste!

Our first item up is a Mentos flavor I've never seen before -- Caramels? With a chocolate center? 

Like many in the Nerd-American community, my first exposure to Mentos was the commercials that ran on heavy rotation during Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Annoying and yet very successful, the "Freshmaker" ads were parodied in an episode of MST3K itself, biting the hand that fed it.

I like Mentos well enough, but this caramel candy with the chocolate center hardly seems to fit in with the idea of "freshmaker," which would be a candy that might make one fresh. Then again, Mentos come in many flavors in other countries, and most of them aren't mint. So, what the hell, let's give them a try.

The candy is a bit odd, in that most chocolate caramels have the chocolate on the outside, but I'll try caramel in any form, as long as it isn't in the feast from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or something like that. And these Mentos are too good to belong there. They are very tasty, a nice caramel flavor and pleasant milk chocolate in the middle. I found them a little hard, but that often happens with Mentos if they've been hanging around for a while. Possibly they would have been soft if they'd been fresher. Hard Mentos need their own freshmaker to freshen them up.

In another case of stuffing chocolate into something else, M&M's has introduced a limited edition Double Chocolate candy. This actually is milk chocolate with a white chocolate center, covered in the usual M&M's candy coat.

I liked these quite a bit. White chocolate is awfully sweet, but here its sweetness is tempered by its combination with the milk chocolate. It might have been even better with dark chocolate. Me, I can handle the sweetness of white chocolate, because I have like a super power for that (kind of like Roger Mooking with hot food), but other, lesser folk can't handle the sweet. Even those unfortunates may like these M&M's.

Now that we've had dessert, on to breakfast! Today we're serving exploding cereal!

General Mills' new Blasted Shreds, which are available in Peanut Butter Chocolate and what I got, the Cinnamon Toast Crunch flavor. General Mills wants us very much to know two things about this product:

1) Its #1 ingredient is whole grain;

2) It's got a lot of flavor. As they say on the site:

MORE WHOA THAN WHEAT!

I opened the box and didn't think there was a lot of WHOA obviously apparent. The individual shredded wheat blocks are not half a foot high, as on the box; here's one in a tablespoon measure:

My first impression, eating one dry: They did seem to have a good deal of flavor, but I thought it was more like the Apple version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch that I reviewed last year. For a pro review, I turned as always to the inimitable Mr. Breakfast and his Cereal Project. Mr. B was impressed by the density of the cereal: "I'd recommend filling your cereal bowl about 1/2 as full as you would with other cereals you eat.... Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds have a big cinnamon punch (just short of overwhelming). The flavor is more bold than in regular Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. This new cereal is just slightly too sweet."

Again with the too sweet! 

On the whole he liked them enough to award them 6 of 7 golden eggs, although he did prefer the Peanut Butter Chocolate variety.

As I post this, I am eating a bowl of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Blasted Shreds, and I find that they do indeed pack a lot of cinnamon and a lot of wheat into those little squares. Most shredded wheat blocks have a lot of air in them, but not these bad boys.

Now I am just hoping that the Blasted part doesn't refer to what they do in your colon. I've got church later, and there's a lot old folks and small kids in our congregation and just two bathrooms. Wish me luck.

(Such an intestinal reaction would sum up my opinion of "Lance Armstrong" Brady and the rest of the NFL, but that's a story for another time. The only bowl that interests me on this Super Bowl Sunday is the cereal bowl. And, uh, maybe the toilet bowl.)