My soft food diet is over, and while I’m already planning my “welcome back” house party—which will feature bowls of chips, volleyball-sized lumps of Laffy Taffy, and an edible piñata—I figured I’d have one last mushy hurrah by reviewing a cereal(ish) product quite unlike any I’ve tried before.

It’s one of three mueslis (I bet “Mueslis” will be one of the names given to an obscure background alien from Star War Episode VII) from Kashi that is designed to be filled with milk at night, refrigerated, and enjoyed the next morning.

I chose this flavor not just because “Cacao Nib” sounds like he could be the Ewok copilot of Mueslis in their Extended Universe novel, but because the other two flavors, Sunflower Pepita and Cherry Cinnamon & Cardamom gave me unpleasant mental images of eating fibrous stalks and spice cabinets.

Let’s have a “nib”ble, shall we?

Sniffing the dry contents, even after I had poured in my milk, was more than a little discouraging. This stuff smelled like bird feed, plain and simple, with just a touch of topsoil mixed in.

But as a firm believer in refrigerator alchemy, I left my covered and stirred cup for all the nighttime pixies to work their magic.

After eagerly waiting, I peeled open my chilled, belated Christmas present.

Well, of all the mueslis out there, this…uh…sure is one ’em. It certainly isn’t gorgeous, but I’ve written love poems about bagels much uglier than this, so I’m withholding any judgement based on appearances.

I dug in, and the texture was quite dense—imagine soft serve ice cream stuffed with oodles of chewy…stuff. And speaking of ice cream, the overall taste can be accurately summarized with one metaphor: you know that moment when you’re at the end of a Fudgsicle, and you’re gnawing at the last bits that have stuck to the stick?

Well this entire muesli tastes just like those bits. It’s equal parts creamy vanilla, gritty chocolate, and damp balsa wood.

If you take the time to probe the different parts of this muesli habitat for woodland creatures, there are more complex flavor notes. Some bites had undertones of roasted almond and/or toasted coconut, though they were fleeting and faint.

Oh, and then there are the tiny chia seeds that provide no flavor and just like to play hide and seek within all the hard-to-reach crevasses of your teeth that you probably didn’t even know existed. I could spare more choice words on these buggers, but I don’t want to have to NSFW tag this post.

And the cacao nibs, when eaten alone, provided a unique burst of earthy, rich cocoa—as if Kashi had dipped dark chocolate squares into a cup of bold Colombian black coffee and pulverized them with a sledgehammer.

But since I’m an uncivilized brute, I didn’t want to bother swishing, spitting, and analyzing my muesli like some dementedly dedicated wine taster. Instead, I just gobbled it down.

And that’s the weird thing. It might be because I had to wait so long to eat it, but even though I rarely enjoyed this woodsy misfire of a muesli (because who really likes those last gummy giblets of Fudgsicle?), it was still compelling enough that I somehow finished the whole thing before I knew it.

As the old idiom goes, “it was like a train wreck—so hideous I couldn’t look away.” Or should I say grain wreck?

Either way, I’ll give you points for one thing, Kashi. Spoonful after spoonful, you made me remember that one time I tripped face first into the woodchips of the school playground after eating a chocolate Hostess Cupcake for lunch.

The Bowl: Kashi Cacao Nib, Almond, & Coconut Overnight Muesli

The Breakdown: An unavoidably powerful wood flavor overwhelms all the more interesting cacao notes of this muesli. However, the concept is still novel enough that you might find yourself munching it all down anyway.

The Bottom Line: 4.5 hard to understand differences between cacao and cocoa out of 10