Look, I’m all for cool (especially the literally cool) cereal collaborations, but I’m sensing an ulterior motive with this one.
Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery’s Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? is the latest in their ice cream cereal series, after Birthday Cake Remix and Our Strawberry Blonde. And it has to be a secret social experiment by Post (M-O-M’s parent company) to see just how long they can make a cereal’s full, legal name before they drive snacky journalists wacky.
Well to that I say, nice try, but I’ll just turn it into an ugly acronym that actually takes more exertion to craft than typing it out.
So I know I really buried the lead here, but M-O-M&CSCCDYWS? is making a bold statement by claiming it contains cereal pieces actually flavored like cookie dough (while pairing them with marshmallows, but I doubt anyone in today’s marbit-fatigued zeitgeist really cares about that). There’s been little creativity in the chocolate chip cookie cereal scene as of late, ever since Keebler Cereal and its tragically puff-smothered cookie bits keeled over. That’s why there’s a lot riding on Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? to be more than just another Cookie Crisp chaser.
Now that I’ve told my spellcheck’s autocapitalization settings to not even bother, I can answer the in-sentence question Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? exists to ask:
Much to my surprise, Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some’s soothing gradient of brown puffs aren’t as single-mindedly dedicated to their namesake dessert ore as you might think. See, Cold Stone’s ice cream flavor of the same interrogative name has a lot more complex flavor inflections than just plain ol’ choco-chip dough. The real thing boasts a sized-up laundry list of “French Vanilla Ice Cream with Chocolate Chips, Cookie Dough, Fudge and Caramel.”
The constituent delicacy dominating Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some?: The Cereal: The Breakfast Experience is actually the caramel. From my first bite, I pegged this as not Cookie Crisp, but a generously caramelized cousin—perhaps Chip the Wolf’s feistier cuz Maillard the Fox.
Familiar notes of compact cocoa powder lurk just beneath each caramel-forward spoonful, and the two naturally complement each other well. Between the butteriness of the former and the more grounded sweetness of the latter, their interplay actually brought welcome accents of oven-crisped dough.
Or maybe not oven at all—more like, “dough balls that fell out of the frying pan and into the deep fryer.”
Unlike a certain other recent cookie cereal, marshmallows do a lot of noble work here to break up the nuanced puff glaze—and occasionally tiring corn texture/flavor—with a friendly snap and a burst of levelheaded sugar. This is what a cereal marshmallow should do: help the other pieces alley-oop instead of practicing free throws.
Milk makes CDYWS?’s biggest drawback more obvious: this stuff is sweet. In perhaps its most generous inheritance from the ice cream, Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? cereal is so close to breaching my too-sweet threshold, that I can practically see each puff stealing its dextrose drill to pierce the cloying heavens.
Creamy unification amplifies the above, making this strictly a dessert cereal in my threshold—the kind you can only stomach under the romantic tones and mood lighting of the Minecraft title screen.
Nevertheless, these chips-off-the-new-block cereal pieces present a fascinating flavor lineup. It’s as if someone used Samoa cookies instead of graham crackers on a s’more—in cereal form.
Post & Malt-O-Meal have been the cereal industry’s darling twins this past year, so I’m not surprised these cereal Yankees hit it out of the park again. They may have slightly overindulged their motif of indulgent dessert flavor, but Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some? is still a must for fans of cookie dough—or more accurately, caramel cookie dough.
Fans of spontaneous question marks should also buy it?
The Bowl: Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery’s Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some?
The Breakdown: Half Caramel Crunch Cereal, half dough-dusted corn, this cereal brings enough creativity to the table that it’s safe to eat raw—but maybe not pasteurized.
The Bottom Line: 8.5 Marbit Globetrotters out of 10