Okay, here’s the scoop:

I’ve wanted to start out a review with “here’s the scoop” since I started this blog.

There, now that I got that out of the way, here’s the review:

Birthday Cake Remix is one half—alongside Our Strawberry Blonde—of a landmark partnership between Malt-O-Meal, classically known for their economy-sized cereal bags, not for their industry clout, and Cold Stone Creamery, a left-field ice cream chain with about as much breakfast aisle experience as Meow Mix.

Seriously, this is about as expected as Malt-O-Meal teaming up with Stone Cold Steve Austin to release “And That’s The Bottom Lime” cereal.

So not only does Malt-O-Meal & Cold Stone’s Birthday Cake Remix open the door for other zany cross-category cereals in the future (I’m lookin’ at you, Insomnia Cookies), but it also opens my mouth.

For cereal to enter.

Because I’m ready to eat it now.

Wow: there’s a lot to digest here (and not just because it’s a one pound bag). Consisting of puffs the Pillsbury Dough Boy apparently sneezed Funfetti on and chocolate marshmallows colored like stained coffee cups, Birthday Cake Remix is far and away the strangest cereal I’ve tasted in years.

The aerated sprinkle spheres contribute the bulk of this cereal’s flavor, and they have a hard-to-pin-down flavor that’s a potently cloying cocktail of candied vanilla, bubblegum, what tastes like buttered popcorn jelly beans, and a hint of sweet lemon.

So it’s pretty much like eating Adventure Time’s Candy Kingdom.

In all reality, this strongly artificial puff flavor is like cotton candy: intriguing in concept but a bit overwhelming and ultimately stomach-churning in execution. The aforementioned marbits do contribute a welcome, creamily soft serve-esque chocolate sweetness, but it gets lost behind the irksome bite of the sprinkle-spangled puffs.

Which, now that I think about it, are pretty accurate representatives of a cheap, frosting-hooped birthday cake—perhaps an off-brand “Chocolatey the Orca.”

But not all is lost. Like Ovaltine or a Magic Animal Grow Capsule, Malt-O-Meal’s Birthday Cake Remix undergoes a beautiful transformation with a little liquid reassurance. Appropriately, milk gives the cereal’s hitherto tongue-punchingly sweet puffs a balanced dairy creaminess.

Taken together, I can totally taste unique notes of buttery vanilla ice cream, as the more troublesome gum & Jelly Belly notes fade into milk’s equalizing aether and the zesty lemon notes start to really evoke the tang of buttermilk. But while the puffs get significantly better, the chocolate marshmallows continue to underperform, their potential all but smothered under the weight of both batter and Bessie.

These must be the jadedly rejected chocolate marshmallows who didn’t make it into M-O-M’s Double Chocolate Brownie Crunch like their Ivy League brothers.

Overall, Birthday Cake Remix is unlikely to be a boring cereal to you. But whether it’s “entertaining novelty” or “like eating the ingredients of ice cream” depends entirely on whether you eat it milked or dry. Either way, while I respect Birthday Cake Remix’s innovation and think it’s more birthday cakey than Cookie Crisp’s take—this one is more like an overly frosted cake vs. a stale supermarket one—I don’t predict it’ll be a regular repeat buy, since Malt-O-Meal has so many awesomely better options right now—including the tantalizing promise of Our Strawberry Blonde.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use chocolate syrup to teach this cereal about balance.

The Bowl: Malt-O-Meal Cold Stone Creamery Birthday Cake Remix Cereal

The Breakdown: Overly sweet when dry, but soft servin’ up flavor when milked, this is a fascinating but fairly niche in its appeal cereal.

The Bottom Line: 7 milky Grow Capsules out of 10