Bits.

We all love ’em.

Or at least I do. I love all bits, whether it’s exponentially sugar-fortified cereal dust, forgotten salt-stewed French fry-lets, or the last messy bite of a restaurant meal that you saved as a parting gift for yourself after boxing up the rest of the leftovers—the very same last bite you had to awkwardly tell the waiter you were saving as he’s midway through lifting the plate from your desperate mitts. Or maybe that’s just me.

No matter how you spin it, I’ll always love bits more than pieces. Well, unless it’s those honey mustard and onion pretzel pieces. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my strange bit-diction stems from a long childhood relationship with Timbits: those lovable lil totally-not-doughnut-holes from Tim Hortons that just about any teacher who had a hope of winning their class’ trust would bring in by the party pack-ful on syllabus day.

Though Tim Hortons and his namesake ‘bits were a source of warm nostalgia for my fellow Michiganders, the coffee chain is a more deeply in-granulated cultural epicenter in its country of origin, Canada. So it makes sense that the first ever Timbits Cereal would be released exclusively north of the states—even if I firmly believe my mitten of origin should be considered an annexed state of the Hortonian Empire. Thanks to Cereal Time’s Gabe Fonseca, I was able to secure boxes of both Timbits Cereal flavors, Birthday Cake and Chocolate Glazed.

So let’s all grab a coffee, PBR coffee, or perhaps some strange soup of poutine and Labatt Blue and see if these itty bitty Timbits are a slam dunk.

Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal Review

To me, Timbits will never have a single iconic flavor—from chocolate and plain to powdered and apple fritter, it’s always been the luck of the cardboard draw that forms Timbits’ true, well, draw. So while Chocolate Glazed seems fairly obvious, Birthday Cake is a bit more questionable. It’s one of the newest mainstream Timbits flavors, dropping in 2014 for Tim Hortons’ 50th anniversary, so it feels as if birthday cake doesn’t quite have the seniority to upset other, more flavorfully articulate varieties.

But perhaps I’m just biased: deep down, I simply believe birthday cake can’t work in cereal. Never has a birthday cake cereal burned in my memory longer than a candle about to be extinguished by a 4-year old’s spittle-spewing breath, and it’s because of the flavor’s quite vague definition that I feel it can never be done justice when diluted to breakfast-appropriate sugar standards. After all, what is birthday cake really? Vanilla-ish sugar with a kinda sorta buttercreamy twist? If only Cookie Puss were the gold standard for cake flavoring, rather than some grocery store cake that mis-frosted my name as “Dean.”

Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal isn’t as bad as BC Cookie Crisp, Froot Loops or even Malt-O-Meal Birthday Cake Remix, but it still suffers from many of the same trick candle-worthy trappings.

Let’s start with the good: Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal is more potently flavored than any birthday cake cereal before it, even if that isn’t saying much. There are distinctly custardy notes here, even if they don’t go deeper than the thin veneer of imitation icing that coats each puff. Vanilla is likewise quite pronounced, and this Timbits Cereal is certainly aesthetically appealing—I would absolutely tie dye a shirt with these things if I could refine them down to a fine paste.

Yet, the problem with vanilla custard is that, after the initial pleasure of a bite wears off, you’re left with a triple-sugared husk of corn that retains little of that first taste bud touchdown’s optimistic nuance. In fact, there’s even a dubious aftertaste with Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal that, though it doesn’t necessarily taste terrible, feels syrupy and sticky in the back of your throat—a damning contrast to the tracheal abrasion that inevitably occurs from accidentally swallowing a real Timbit whole during a bout of fangorious feasting.

Milk is really Birthday Cake Timbits Cereal’s hope of retaining lasting flavor distribution, but even then, this is the kind of cereal that gets tiring after a couple bowls, as your memory of each mouthful starts to blend together into one beige malaise of sprinkles and sucrose. All in all, unless it happens to be your actual birthday when you stumble upon a box of Birthday Cake Timbits, you’re probably better off cramming Fudgy the Whale through a melon baller.

The Bottom Line: 4 “Happy Blogday, Serious Lee!” cakes out of 10

Chocolate Glazed Timbits Cereal Review

Now we’re talkin’. I’ll admit, when I first saw Chocolate Glazed Timbits Cereal, I thought it was a shoe-in for “clearest Cocoa Puffs ripoff of the new decade.”

But I’m pleased to report that this isn’t Cocoa Puffs. It’s better.

I’m not sure if this is typical of all cocoa cereals in Canada, or if it’s the “Glazed” component shining through here, but this Timbits Cereal has a richer, slightly bittersweeter chocolate taste than Sonny’s comparatively blander and more processed Puffs. Not that I doubt these Timbits have been synthetically concocted by melting down expired Hershey’s bars as well, but the ‘bits have a bit more smokiness and memorability.

It’s difficult to get too descriptive when it comes to cereals like these, since there are only so many words for “cocoa powder,” but even in milk the Timbits difference is apparent—if you’ve ever wanted something slightly fudgier than your garden variety co-corn puffs, Chocolate Glazed Timbits Cereal is worth pouring in your coffee mug. If I had to compare this to another chocolate cereal, it would be Kellogg’s Chocolate Donut Shoppe Cereal, a similarly Cocoa Puff-adjacent release that actually understands the meaning of glaze.

Granted, Chocolate Glazed Timbits Cereal still loses a bit of its sweet-earthen luster after subsequent bowls, but the potential for mixing it up with other mix-ins is far higher here than with Birthday Cake. Reeses’s Puffs? Go nuts. Real strawberries? Sure. Chocolate-covered espresso beans? Ab-so-lute-ly. And how about those frosted animal cookies, am I right folks?

…

Okay, that one’s just me again.

The Bottom Line: 7.5 cries of “I’m cuckoo for Quebec!” out of 10