Happy birthday, Jesus! I baked you a cake!

Well, okay, no I didn’t. I barely have enough culinary talent to make Chex Mix without my kitchen turning into an inferno of exploding pretzel kindling. I’m sure you could bake your own cake easily enough anyway—you won’t even need yeast, since you know so much about rising again.

But I did get you these new Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treats, which are studded with fun rainbow sprinkles and all kinds of icing. I know loaves and fishes are more your thing, but hey: I think I’ve got some Wonder Bread and Parmesan Goldfish in the back.

So regardless of whether you reading this celebrate Christmas or not, let’s break out the wine and Krispies Treats and have a holly jolly day.

I’ll give Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treats credit for three things:

1) Despite being a birthday-themed snack, each Treat is wrapped like a an early (or super late) Valentine’s Day gift.

2) They smell great: like whipped vanilla custard.

3) The little sprinkles create a fun crunchy contrast with the otherwise chewy and crispy (duh) cereal bars.

But other than that, there’s not much I can say about Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treats that hasn’t already been said about, you know, Rice Krispies Treats. The visions of vanilla custard that danced through my head were quashed like a sugarplum ballerina with a bum ankle.

No matter how hard I strained my tongue to detect subtler flavor notes, manipulating it like a proboscis with a magnifying glass, the thing just tasted like a good old marshmallow and toasted rice square, with ample amounts of creamy sugar, browned butter, and lightly caramelized grain.

In the aftertaste I guess there’s a faint hint of the buttercreamy, frosted animal cookie flavor that delightfully enriches Pink Donut Cereal and Cookies ‘N’ Creme Rice Krispies Treats, but here it’s a mere Keebler-esque ghost, haunting the Treats with tempting zoological wisps of what could have been.

I suppose it’s worth buying these over normal Rice Krispies Treats if you temper your expectations, simply for the crunchy sprinkles and for the fact that you could use these as celebratory pedestals for your favorite action figure (happy birthday, Mumm-Ra!), but ultimately you’d have better luck, more fun, and more batter-covered spatulas to lick if you just made one of the 100s of existing Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treats already out there.

Though in that case, you’ll inevitably have to scroll through some mommy blogger’s War & Peace-length odyssey about planning her twins’ Minecraft-themed roller rink party before even getting to the recipe. So I guess it’s a win-lose.

There’s not much left to say about this haunted Barnum’s Circus of a disappointing Rice Krispies Treat, so I’ll close by wishing you all a happy end to your hopefully hitherto happy holiday season. May it be filled with Christmas Crunch, several kinds stuffing flavored with different barnyard animal-flavored broth, and enough viewings of A Christmas Story to leave you wondering if you stumbled into some Sisyphean Yuletide paradise.

Merry birthday, everyone!

The “Bowl:” Birthday Cake Rice Krispies Treats

The Breakdown: Aside from crunchy sprinkles, an intoxicating aroma, and a kiss from a frosted elephant, these are just normal Rice Krispies Treats. Buy a jar of Funfetti or save your money.

The Bottom Line: 4 major purgatorial awards out of 10