Look, I don’t know much about sacred geometry, but I’m still going to thank it. Whatever Euclidian miracle is allowing my long-lost (or so it feels) Waffle Crisp to live on in spirit post-discontinuation deserves my praise. And Waffle Crisp’s memory isn’t being preserved in just one cereal analogue, either: Chicken & Waffles Cereal, which I’m ashamed to have just casually typed, is be bringing back the real, bite-sized Belgian thing; but Honey Bun Cereal presented an interesting, if not geometrically adjacent, twist on the concept.

The most important similarity is their source: Waffle Crisp and its latest subspecies are all made by Post. Post just happens to own Malt-O-Meal, making the economically bagged and bulging cereal company’s new Peanut Butter Cookie Bites a technical tangential relative of Waffle crisp, too. Though these PB pieces are round, I simply can’t disown them from my mental retcon of Waffle Crisp genealogy, as they have their father’s tic-tac-toed belly.

But will Malt-O-Meal’s Peanut Butter Cookie Bites live up to its nostalgically syruped parentage, or am I simply using this long-winded introduction to cope with Waffle Crisp’s disappearance? Better try coping calorically to compare.

Unfortunately (but not tragically), these cookies are Waffle Crisp in shape alone.

See, for those who made the connection that if Post owns Peanut Butter Cookie Bites, then it sure is suspicious how these wee cookies look just like post-anaphase Nutter Butter Cereal pieces. And your quiet hunch about their likeness would be right: Peanut Butter Cookie Bites is Nutter Butter Cereal at a canola-copied ingredients level, even if it’s been remolded by its twin-faced creator’s cereal Play-Doh press.

Since the taste is indistinguishably identical to Nutter Butter Cereal, it doesn’t seem productive to fully rehash that review’s finer points. Long cheat meal short, both PB Cookie Bites and NBC (that peacock will have to drag this acronym out of my soggy, dead hands) are very creamy peanut butter cereals. Their thick, desert sand-powdered pieces taste equal parts buttery and oily—much like actual Nutter Butter filling, or perhaps finely spread Reese’s guts.

I only had a few main problems with Nutter Butter Cereal, and only 1.5 of them survived the cookie-to-cookie peanut transplant. First, the full problem: thanks to its dusty blanket, Peanut Butter Cookie Bites are still suh-weet to the point where, after just one bowl, you’ll have to catch a hyphenated breath in the middle of your adjectives. The cookies clock in at 12 grams of sugar per serving, which is a gram lower than Nutter Butter Cereal. That’s because PB Cookie Bites’ have a 3/4-cup serving size 3 grams fewer than Nutter Butter Cereal’s 1 cup, which speaks to the problem PB Cookie Bites solves.

With the awkwardly sized and curved Nutter Butter pieces, trying to play spoon Tetris with more than a few pieces was maddening—unless you brought a ladle. M-O-M’s pancake-flat peanut butter waffles make for far more efficient shoveling and serving size density, not to mention their potential for portraying post-plastic pizza Ninja Turtle action figure food.

The final Nutter nitpick Peanut Butter Cookie Bites half-solves is the base flavor. In my NBC review, I noted how the base flavor lacks a hearty cookie flavor of its own—making the taste more filling than container. However, after scanning both nutty cereals’ ingredients lists, I’ve come to appreciate both Post and Malt-O-Meal’s choices to use corn and oat flour mixes all across the board. Because while I can dream of a more doughy core, it’s sure better than the nightmare that would’ve been a cornmeal cookie.

Milk is again a cautious yes. PB Cookie Bites creamily and porously suck up milk like a true Waffle Crisp wayfarer, but the sometimes-overwhelming endmilk dredged up by the flavor powder, which falls off as readily as a Cloverfield parasite, is definitely not fun for all ages of stomach. Plus, it leaves behind stripped vessels whose best feature is their lack of corn.

It’s ultimately a ‘beat the sog’ type of spoon frenzy, which is where Peanut Butter Cookie Bites once again proves that small and steady wins the race.

If you loved Nutter Butter Cereal, Peanut Butter Cookei Bites are a no-brainer update, even if it only brings minor bug fixes and quality of life improvements. I heard from many who hated Nutter Butter Cereal that the stuff had a weird moldy smell to them. I’ve never experienced such a phenomenon—though I do hate soapy cilantro, if there’s a correlation—so someone else may have to report back on whether that complain persists. For those on the fence, just ask yourself one question to gauge this 2-pound bag’s pantry worthiness:

Have you ever wanted to make DIY Nutter Butter Bites using just a bag, a jar, and a knife?

The Bowl: Malt-O-Meal Peanut Butter Cookies Bites

The Breakdown: A freshly refreshed take on an already innovative peanut butter cereal style, PB Cookie Bites bring the oil, butter, and sweetness in droves to make it a big bag of cereal you’ll likely love to eat in 15 seconds out (partly out of sheer necessity.

The Bottom Line: 9 PB Play-Doh spaghetti noodles out of 10