S'mores vs. Waffles

I feel like a kid again. What's better: S'mores or waffles? Two of the supermarket's most sugary, unhealthy, unnatural, highly processed, and damn delicious cereals (in small doses, at least) currently reside in my kitchen cabinet, for no reason other than the fact that they were on sale, and I am, on occasion, a sucker for sugary cereals. I have fond memories of Post's Waffle Crisp, a cereal that hasn't been around for ages yet seems to have been reborn as Kellogg's Eggo Cereal. Adjacent to the latter at Pac N Save was an attractive blue box of Smorz cereal. So I picked them both up for $2 a pop.

Smorz:

This cereal, which only vaguely resembles real food, features subtly sweet "graham cracker" pieces flavored with "cinnamon" (I'm happy to report they stay very crunchy in milk and don't change the milk's color) paired with little cylindrical "marshmallow" pieces, like the kind that comes in hot chocolate packets, but bigger and swirled with chocolate. That's it. A spoonful or two or three ain't bad at all. But one thing this cereal did not do was remind me of s'mores. Not once, I tell you, did I experience the sensation that I was sitting around a campfire munching on actual, delicious, gooey s'mores. In fact, Smorz is to s'mores what Apple Jacks is to apples (remember the commercials? "If they named it Apple Jacks, shouldn't it taste like ... APPLES?").

Thanks to the marshmallows, Smorz is also exceedingly sweet -- but perhaps not as much as Lucky Charms. It's great as a snack because the graham-cracker pieces are big enough to handle. I learned that two actual bowls of this stuff in a row is more than I can take. In fact, it was so cloyingly sweet (like that word?) that I had to abandon my plans of following up the Smorz with a bowl of Eggo Cereal. That would have to come another day. Still, despite all this, it's a cereal I might buy again someday, if primarly for straight-from-the-box snacking. Probably not worth legitmizing with milk.

Eggo Cereal:

Instead of Waffle Crisp, it dawns on me that this would be a good name for a gang: Waffle Crips. At initiation events and other such gatherings, members could eat waffles dyed in blue food coloring. But I digress. The cereal is not actually called Waffle Crisp, after all -- that's the name of its predecessor in the waffle cereal lineage. Eggo Cereal is pretty damn similar and I'd have to do a side-by-side comparison to identify the differences. I think it's just been repackaged and rebranded. But I digress again. Must be all that sugar I just consumed.

Eggo Cereal pieces are golden-yellow waffle discs in the shape of a hockey puck and slightly smaller in size than Smorz's graham-cracker pieces. They have a syprupy, buttery, cinnamony taste and a multi-dimensional crunch with a lot of personality. They soften in milk, but not necessarily in a bad way -- provided you don't let them soak there for too long. The cereal is considerably less sweet than Smorz, and much more palatable in general. I could eat a couple big bowls of this in a row and not feel like I just ate four packages of Fun Dip.

Smorz has its strong points, but in this contest Eggo Cereal is the clear winner. Not that it tastes anything like waffles.