Garytoons!

Well, as they say, it’s been a minute since my last review, and so rather than review just one cereal, I’ll do a whole bunch of them.  More bang for your buck, right?

Believe it or not, it’s hard for even ME to keep up with all the varieties of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (which I will herein lazily refer to as “CTC”) that there are in the world today.  But, for your sake, and the sake of science, I do try.  And so here, I will try to hit (and rank) all of the ones I have tried (and I’ve tried darn near all of ’em!) or can find evidence of via the google.  Let me know if I’ve missed any!

And so, once upon a time, there was the original humble, lovable Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  Tasty, cinnamony, yummy.

 

 

And, like all successful things, if one is good, exploiting it for a million more is loads better.

Soon, the family expanded to include the varieties below:

 

 

The Blueberry and Strawberry didn’t even start off as CTC cereals – they were called “Tiny Toast” until General Mills greedily inserted them into the CTC family, which didn’t even really help, because they don’t seem to be around anymore today, as far as I can tell.

I am not sure if I ever tried Apple CTC; I probably did, but if I did, it didn’t really stick out in my memory.  And, weirdly enough, as popular as it is, I am not sure that I’ve ever tried French Toast Crunch, either. Maybe as a kid.  It looks kind of thin, and honestly, I’m semi-annoyed that General Mills brought it back after discontinuing it years earlier, but they won’t bring back the original oat recipe to my beloved Monster Cereals, and I am probably staying away from it in protest for that reason alone.

Hey, but at least I’m not bitter about it, right? ;-D

Anyhow, speaking of being bitter, there was another CTC variety I loved back in the day, and so of course they quit making it the minute they found out:

 

 

Wow, that was a good cereal.

Moving on, some other later entries into the CTC family are CTC Churros (and Chocolate Toast Crunch (and CTC Chocolate Churros!)).

 

Scrumptious, every darn last one of ’em.

Happily, still not content with all of these, General Mills also introduced a couple of holiday CTCs:

 

 

People eat apple pie at the holidays, and it’s my website, darn it, so I’m calling Apple Pie Toast Crunch a holiday cereal. 🙂

And here’s another recent entry, which we have in our pantry but have not yet tried:

 

And, finally, before I rank all of the above, I recently bumped into this latest entry into the ever-burgeoning family of CTC cereals at the local Big Bird (aka Giant Eagle, aka Market District):

 

 

Seeing as it’s called Cinnagraham Toast Crunch, I figured it’d probably taste like a cinnamony version of another Big G favorite, Golden Grahams.  I figured wrong!

It’s a good cereal – it’s cinnamony, stays crunchy in milk, and all that… but you can see, for starters, that the color is a good bit more… well… orangey, I think, than the image on the box.

And there’s nothing in the ingredients to back this up, mind you, but to me, it looks (and tastes) like pumpkin spice.  Which, shockingly, to my knowledge, doesn’t yet exist.  When they rebrand this as Pumpkin Spice CTC in a year or two, though, you can say you read it here first.

Honestly, it tastes pumpkin spice-y to me.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  Just kinda weird when you’re expecting a graham taste.  A fine entry, but not in the upper echelon of CTC cereals, imho.

And so – the moment you’ve all been waiting for – my completely, entirely biased ranking of all of the CTC cereals I have tried thus far, based solely on my own personal, highly questionable tastes!

Here we go:

1. Chocolate Toast Crunch – a tough choice, for me, as they’re very close to Chocolate Churros as far as yumminess goes, but I like them just a little bit better, maybe for the uniqueness factor – the only chocolate square-shaped CTC entry.
2. Chocolate Churros – they’re huge, they’re chocolate – ’nuff said.
3. Churros – huge, not chocolate, but still just darn tasty.
4. Peanut Butter Toast Crunch – if you liked peanut butter, it really was that good.
5. Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch – I think my wife would probably rank this one first, and it really is a very good cereal – like the original, but less cinnamony, with a kind of a vanilla-y sugar coating all over it.  Yum. 🙂 We hunt for it every year at Christmastime!
6. Cinnamon Toast Crunch – the OG, a really, really good cereal, as evidenced by the fact that it’s still around and they made 4 million varieties of it, give or take.
7. Apple Pie Toast Crunch – they really did manage to make it taste a bit like apple pie, somehow.  Still patiently waiting for Mincemeat Pie Toast Crunch. 😉
8. Everything Else. 🙂 – yeah, I’m being a little lazy in lumping all of the rest of them together, probably, but honestly, they’re all fine, but just not as good as the ones I ranked above ’em.

So, there you have it!  I hope you’ve enjoyed having your time wasted with my cerealdiculous nonsense as much as I have enjoyed wasting it for you! 🙂  Please feel free to waste mine even further and let me know your own personal CTC rankings and/or faves! 😀