Dipped. Dunked. Coated. Frosted. There are many dramatic ways—each dastardly and delightful—to bestow chocolatey goodness upon an otherwise indecently nude food morsel. I’ll be honest that I didn’t really know there was an industry distinction between chocolate-coated and chocolate-dipped flakes, but thanks to this allegedly groundbreaking new variety of Special K, we can be assured that choco-coated flakes are totally boring ol’ fudgy-duddies, while their dipped brethren are show-stopping pioneers in their field.

That’s a lot of hype for the cereal equivalent of Lay’s chocolate-dipped potato chips, which ended up having more charming novelty than rubber dog poop, but far less than those top hat-wearing drinking birds. Those guys have charm and novelty dripping down their felted chins! Let’s see how hip this chocolate dip really is.

(It was between that lame rhyming line and “let’s see how fun this ‘due really is.”)

If you read my bite-sized take on Shaq & Tony’s Frosted Flakes with Crispy Cinnamon Basketballs, you’d know I’ve recently developed a droll fascination with the self-defined concept of “horse cereals”: cereals that are juuuust palatable enough to aimlessly eat (as if from a strapped-on feedbag) without any lasting enjoyment or memorability. And I hate to say it, but Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond is a derby-winning example of a horse cereal—so don’t go hoofing it to the store to buy this stuff just yet.

When eating Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond, I wasn’t surprised to see the dipped flakes had been way overhyped—but I was still disappointed. There aren’t a lot of them, and frankly, it’s tough to pick them out from the many cocoa-coated flakes that form a bulk of the cereal. Sure, when you bite directly into one of these dipped flakes—sized more like mouse prints than moose tracks—there’s a pleasant-enough pop of creamy milk chocolate, but when eating an actual bowl, this uniqueness is swallowed up by Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond’s other biggest problem:

There are too many dang almonds!

Listen, I like almonds as much as—nay, likely far more than—the next guy. Lightly salted almonds are something I’d happily fill a feedbag with on their own—and by googling “Can horses have almonds?” as a result of this sentence, I found out they’re actually an equine superfood! But in a cereal, their many-slivered woodsy earthiness acts like a sweet-sponging buffer that obscures Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond’s more delectably dipped and charmingly chocolatey notes.

Milk gently evolves Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond from “just alright” to *McConaughey voice* “alright, alright, alright.” By softening the almond fore-taste, milk’s creaminess likewise ups the perceived creaminess of the milk chocolate dipped flakes, even if it’s a cocoa placebo.

Like I said, this is a suitably pleasant cereal you’ll definitely be able to graze through by the boxful, but by the next time you hit the cereal aisle, you’ll forget you ever even tried it. The chocolate-dipped flakes simply can’t compare to even the richer chocolate squares in Special K Chocolatey Delight, so their overhyped debut makes the whole final product feel like a bit of a letdown.

Nice try though, Special K. Maybe you should just take this whole cereal, dunk it in fudge, and try again.

The Bowl: Special K Dipped Chocolatey Almond

The Breakdown: A fine enough cocoa-nut cereal, this is ultimately a forgettable, lowercase “Normal k” that falls somewhere between a high trot and a low canter.

The Bottom Line: 5.5 slim dunks out of 10