When Taco Bell initially announced its cream-filled Cap’n Crunch Delights, I compared them to testicles. Now that I have had them in my mouth I must amend that comparison to read “delicious testicles.”
Or maybe just toss out the word “testicles” altogether. I’m not a food marketer, I am a snackologist, so it’s not my job to decide whether or not a major restaurant chain should plaster pictures of what still looks like a pair of evacuated testes all over the outside of its establishments. My job is to observe this and then pull over to judge the resulting product.
And so I did. My expedition to 2nd and Charles to pick up some incredibly expensive retro video games was curtailed by an entire 15 minutes thanks to my dedication to snackology. Thankfully the copy of Shaq-Fu for the Super Nintendo was still there when I arrived, but had it not the sacrifice would have been warranted.
Sold in packs of two or four, the Cap’n Crunch Delights is the latest attempt by Taco Bell to get people to line up at the drive-thru every morning for a breakfast menu that’s even less Mexican than their standard lunch and dinner fare. The breakfast menu has its good and bad points, and the recent addition of incredibly dry biscuit sandwiches has upped its profile, but to this day I have never been behind another car in a Taco Bell drive-thru prior to 10 AM.
That’s okay, more food for me. And considering the store I went to screwed up my order, made me drive to the front of the store to make way for the nobody behind me and then added a four-pack of standard Cinnabon Delights for my trouble, wow. Just wow.
The Cap’n Crunch Delights are actually a derivative of those warm and oddly-milky Cinnabon nuggets. Instead of golden brown outside and a light yellow inside, these are the color of unhealthy organs on the outside and fake-as-hell red on the inside.
The exterior is rolled in cereal dust, lending the signature scent and visual cues of Cap’n Crunch to the balls. The yellow, blue and pink sweetened corn is much like the dust found at the bottom of a bag of Crunch Berry cereal, and everyone knows that’s the best bit.
As for the inside...
...well they can’t all be winners. Some foods are the proper size to be popped into the mouth whole for a reason. If Taco Bell had expected people to slice these open and photograph them I’m positive they would have taken steps to ensure the insides didn’t look like someone had violent sex with a strawberry doughnut.
Do not worry, my friends, for the taste of these strange-looking deflated spheres overcomes their appearance the moment they disappear into your gaping maw. Warm berry-ish flavor of the vaguely-Crunch variety bursts against the tongue, the glaze/cream/definitely not ejaculate lending a hint of milk to the experience. It’s like a mouthful of Cap’n Crunch in warm milk, which tastes much better than it sounds.
The only fault I can find with these Cap’n Crunch Delights is the slightly bitter tang of overused frying oil, which should only be a problem for a Taco Bell location that doesn’t properly maintain its fryers. Those are pretty rare, I would wildly imagine.
Check out the video for a more instantaneous reaction, as long as you can deal with my unkempt appearance—I was not expecting to work today. I was also not expecting deep-fried Cap’n Crunch balls filled with cream from a fast food restaurant to be delicious. It’s a surprising sort of day.
Snacktaku is Kotaku’s take on the wild and wonderful world of eating things, but not eating meals. Eating meals is for those with too much time on their hands.
To contact the author of this post, write to fahey@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @bunnyspatial.