Maplemania: a disease that has afflicted many, myself included. It’s native to Canada and and regions of Vermont, and symptoms of this affliction include relentless addiction to syrup-drenched pancakes, habitual licking of maple trees, and compulsive urges to bathe in tubs full of milk-soaked Waffle Crisp.

Recommended treatment is a continual IV drip of Grade A Dark Amber. Or, you know, maybe just a bowl of Peace Cereal’s Maple Pecan Clusters & Flakes cereal. The cereal claims to be flavored with real maple syrup, but will it properly sedate a maplemaniac like me?

For Mrs. Butterworth’s sake, we’d better hope so.

The first part of this cereal my eyes and tastebuds are drawn to are the clusters. This is probably because each ridged and craterous oat cluster is large enough to have its own gravitational pull.

They have a fun, crisp crunch that eventually devolves into a softer crumble. The maple flavor is far from dominating—it prefers to linger in the background with a golden amber sweetness. Instead, each cluster has strong taste notes of brown sugary dough, with fainter notes of cinnamon and molasses.

This gives me sad, tearful flashbacks of all the gingerbread men I munched only two months ago. I miss you, my gingery friends. Though I’m sure you’re still with me somewhere in my love handles.

All cookie eulogies aside, these clusters taste essentially like Sweet Home Farm’s Maple Pecan Granola…if that granola were baked into a wonderful cookie by some loving grandmother.

The flakes here are comically large and saucer-like—I could probably serve a full bowl of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes inside of each one. After biting into a bunch of ’em, they don’t really have much of a flavor. Instead, their flavor comes off like lightly salted potato chips. The flakes’ texture supports this, too, as each flake is thick with a satisfying crunch.

I’m guessing the source of that saltiness is the shy pecan pieces that come out of their shell at rare intervals to introduce a welcome burst of salt and savoriness. Each pecan piece is quite soft, melting in my mouth like a savory dissolvable vitamin. Flintstone’s Chewables have nothing on these bad boys.

Eating every piece together, it’s quite eerie how much it felt and tasted like I was eating a bowl of potato chips. With the corn, salt, and faint ribbons of maple syrupiness, this is what I imagine Lay’s inevitable limited edition “French Toast Ruffles” will taste like.

This isn’t a bad thing by any means; it’s certainly a unique and tasty flavor. And these Maple Pecan Clusters taste even more unique in milk, as the previously light maple taste becomes richer and more malted in its sweetness.

So while the maple-hungry zombie still wishes there was a little more syrup flavor, Peace Cereal’s Maple Pecan Clusters & Flakes do innovative and delectable things with taste and texture.

I rarely get to write the word “malted” outside of my “Whopper & Milk Dud” fanfictions, so any cereal that brings a more complex sweetness to the table is worth munching again and again. Anyone who’s sick of “straight, unadulterated blasts of granulated marshmallow dextrose” will enjoy the more sophisticated touches of this cereal.

Malted malted malted malted malted.

Mmm, that felt good.

The Bowl: Peace Cereal Maple Pecan Clusters & Flakes

The Breakdown: Not the mapliest of maple cereals, but this cereal’s chip-like crunch and salty-sweet munch are memorable nonetheless.

The Bottom Line: 9 flabby gingerbread man ghosts out of 10

(Quick Nutrition Facts: 240 calories, 11 grams of sugar, and 5 grams of protein in every 1 cup serving)

***Note, this sample was one of several sent to me by Attune Foods. However, I have seen the whole Peace Cereal Line at Whole Foods, if you’re trying to track down a box.***