Though they share a mother in milk, there are perhaps no other food pairings quite as harmonious and simultaneously anachronistic as cereal and cookies. One carries an entire nation’s breakfast connotations on its sugared back, while the other cloaks its doughy balls in the sinful jar of night. And yet, I can’t think of any one prepared treat that has inspired more cereals than the cookie, with its manifold masquerade of infinite options:

Oreo cereal. Nilla cereal. Even a modern holiday classic. I’ll admit this is a hollow victory, since the cookie clan certainly has such a broad definition. But hey, there are a ton of ice cream flavors out there, and with a few exceptions, cereals flavored like those suckers/lickers keep striking out.

Post & Malt-O-Meal (essentially creative twins, but one more literally thinks outside the box) are continuing the cookie’s never-crumbling reign by expanding their line of Cookie Bites even further. What started as a clear chip off the ol’ Cookie Crisp became Nutter Butter Cereal’s better half earlier this year. Now, it’s taking aim at the holiday season…a whole five months early?

I won’t question the business strategy behind dropping a snickerdoodle cereal in the summer, but all I’m saying is that if a cereal’s gonna celebrate Christmas in July, it better be offering me a steal of a deal on a used Kia Sorento.

You, like I, may have expected this to be a direct knockoff of Snickerdoodle Kookies, an Aldi-exclusive Millville cereal that, through exhaustively stupid research, was proved to be a Post subsidiary product. But alas, M-O-M’s voyage into the Land of Snickerdoodlium is a bit different—and perhaps a bit better.

See, where Kookies favored a thick cinnamon-sugar dusting over a more barren and flavor-withered corn disk, Malt-O-Meal’s correctly consonant-ed Cookie Bites prefer to bake the cinnamon cookie flavor right into every piece. This means less auburn dust in the sordid corners of your coffee table, and an on-tongue experience that preserves each spoonful’s flavor, from first chew to the climactic gulp.

And Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites’ taste is more addictive, too. The cinnamon taste presents a good balance of traditional sweetness and woody warmth. The base could still stand to be heartier, but nevertheless, as those two flavors meld and merge, the end result is somewhere between a Scooby-Doo Cinnamon Graham Cracker Stick and one of those Biscoff cookies they serve on every airline. To put this in cereal terms, it’s kind of like a hybrid between Cinnamon Toast Crunch Churros’ matte-finish cinnamon foundation and Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’s confectionary sugar-butter.

(And boy, Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch is gonna be soooooo jealous when it wakes up from its 10-month hibernation.)

The necessity of milk will depend on where your personal preferences fall in that analogical Toast Crunch Continuum. If you prefer Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’s sugar-forward take on cookies, milk will do a better job of highlighting Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites’ cinnamon-sweetness, while keeping it dry presents a more earthen, grounded and Grandma’s kitchenette-esque cinnamon profile.

In short, eating it dry is like putting on a weighted blanket, whereas adding milk is like having a dream you’re eating a cinnamon marshmallow (read: your drool-stained pillow).

Coming off the tantalizing tail of a complex cereal like Cookie Doughn’t You Want Some?, I didn’t have high hopes for what I saw as “just another cinnamon cereal.” But Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites proves itself to be more than the lack of its parts. I’ve definitely reviewed so many cinnamon cereals that I could craft an entire biological taxonomy of their related flavors, but in the end, I think these Cookie Bites deserve a steady place in the cereal aisle—their unique sugar-doodle accents puts them well above other cinnamon twists.

And they even make great Fillows filler for when you inevitably need to dilute the stuff to prevent early-onset food pregnancy.

The Bowl: Malt-O-Meal Snickerdoodle Cookie Bites

The Breakdown: A smart balance of cinnamon warmth and sugary…sugar, this is a clever evolution of the Cookie Bites micro-franchise, although it gets the short end of the “in-aisle analysis paralysis” stick when compared to the unbeatable base of Based Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Might be best to stow away a box for Yuletide breakfasts.

The Bottom Line: 8.5 turbulent in-flight cereal bowls out of 10