Are you prepared for this responsibility?

I sure hope so, because we already have this Strawberry Blonde. It’s not just your Strawberry Blonde or my Strawberry Blonde.

This is Our Strawberry Blonde, so if you weren’t ready to telekinetically eat this cereal with me, then you shouldn’t have decided to trade your usual Cocoa Krispies for an infant-sized bag containing a revolutionary gastronomic feat that blends honey graham squares (Golden Grahams who had their identities stolen), strawberry puffs (rarely seen pieces that I hope were stolen from the JIF PB&J dumpster at the Kellogg’s factory), and the perennial favorite: “marshmallows” (looking as amorphously rotund as always).

It’s a daring pairing, but after witnessing the transformative taste bud magic of Malt-O-Meal and Cold Stone Creamery’s other cereal pairing, I wouldn’t be surprised if this reunification of three potent cereal powers turns saucily sorcerous.

Care to scream with me?

My first bite of Malt-O-Meal and Cold Stone Creamery’s Our Strawberry Blonde is disorienting. That prediction of mine was half right: these are some strong flavors to just slap together. And it takes my palate a second to decipher the different taste notes.

Trust me: this is a cereal you’ll want to build up to, by understanding each piece like I usually do for review purposes.

First up are the honey graham squares. Now they’re definitely not as good as Golden Grahams: where the latter big name brand has a mouthwatering honey sheen on every square, Malt-O-Meal’s take nails the wholesome and buttery graham, but lacks in the honey department. This is probably because each square also has passing strawberry debris clinging to it, diluting the honey flavor further.

Take that as a warning, NASA: if craterous strawberry meteors near the Earth, take them out with your best rocket spoons.

The strawberry puffs are also near-puckeringly candied and sweet on first tastes, and subsequent acclimatizing spoonfuls only manage to dull it down to an anxious strawberry syrup. On the plus side, their corn and oat flour blend makes these strawberry puffs way hardier and unidirectionally flavored than Franken Berry, making me hope for a Yummy Mummy-topping return of oat flour this Halloween.

Finally the marshmallows are marshmallows: sugary and a bit snappy, these are born flavor enhancers that lack interesting or lasting impact when eaten alone.

This is all to say that while no pieces in Our Strawberry Blonde can really live alone, they’re wonderful together. The earthen-sweet graham squares and the berries-n-cream-inducing marshmallows work together to tame the strawberry sea before them, and when they’re all together, it kind of makes me think of a strawberry ice cream cone, as the squares here do a better job of mimicking a real Our Strawberry Blonde’s waffle cone than its crust pieces.

But speaking of a real ice cream flavor, adding milk to Our Strawberry Blonde cereal really brings the moisturizing lactose and milkfat that the astronautical dry cereal experience lacked.

I even begin to notice why the cereal was so confoundingly rich on the first taste: what I took for just fortified graham was really a darker molasses taste, and that type of unifying realization really makes the whole cereal even more memorable. I can’t say if Malt-O-meal—perhaps under threat of Cold Stone’s weaponized lava cakes—intentionally included molasses to simulate the real ice cream concoction’s caramel dressing, but it’s still a happy miracle.

So thank you, M-O-M & CSC for letting us adopt Our Strawberry Blonde. It’s quite an easy bundle of soy lectichen enriched joy to lift—from bowl to spoon to mouth.

The Bowl: Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone Creamery Our Strawberry Blonde Cereal

The Breakdown: Graham, strawberry, and marshmallow is already an exciting crossover episode (the standalone content is all forgettable), but the addition of a possibly accidental but very much amazing caramel taste helps OSB a well-honed cone.

The Bottom Line: 9 dunked-on Franken Berries and Golden Grahams out of 10