We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a breakfast star.

Our dearly departed Cinnamon Star Crunch, who will remain in our hearts, minds, and stomach memories forever, lived a short life. Only on shelves for the 2016 holiday season, the tragically young crunchy cinnamon stars have now died a second death.

To paraphrase Banksy, who, like the palate-tearing stars, enjoys shredding things, “They say you’re discontinued twice. Once when you stop crunching and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your limited edition existence for the last time.” 

You see, now that Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch, the ivory-sugared golden boy of holiday seasons 2015 & 2016, has returned to the delight of many, its deliciously

raw (yet processed) yuletide impact will likely wipe Cinnamon Star Crunch from our collective cultural memory. It’s up to we few remaining cereal historians to preserve the cereal’s name, and its sort of, well, uniquely, umm…it tasted like cinnamon, right?

Wait, what am I doing in this black suit and tie? I’ve got Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch to eat! 

My original Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch review makes a lot of good points—I was a lot more imaginative in my younger days of three years ago, before I passed the randomly occurring signpost of aging that says you can’t eat cereal en masse without gastric repercussion. So instead of merely miming my early words about SCTC’s browned butter beauties (did I just plagiarize myself?), I want to discuss an interesting phenomenon that I believe makes this cereal so deserving of its imaginary Internet accolades.

I call it “Operation White Out.”

Every spoonful, handful, or cookie sheet-full of Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch has two phases. In act one, the ludicrously powdered squares, with their ability to cropdust dark clothing so fast it’d make a powdered doughnut retire to the bagel industry, hit your palate with a resounding blizzard of powdered sugar. It’s a high-density sweetness, and I’d probably call it cloying if there weren’t a bevvy of soothing vanilla undertones to give the otherwise one-note sugar taste a little depth, courtesy of the vanilla orchid’s musical fruit.

Despite its tastiness, this phase is still saccharinely challenging. That’s where the true, delayed-release beauty of SCTC’s second phase comes in. Because just as my taste buds feel ready to wilt, my jolted chewing turns the simple sugar flavor into a deeply doughy delight. The back-half of a Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch spoonful is still based in unadulterated sucrose, but it’s restrained by subtle notes of elegant egginess, the mildness cinnamon (think Frosted Toast Crunch: Sugar Cookie’s missing link to Cinnamon Toast Crunch), and yes, browned butter.

(An ingredient for whom I exclusively reserve the nickname “bb-cakes”)

Eating it all together reveals one mistake in my old article: compared to the likes of Pink Donut Cereal, Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch tastes less like frosted animal crackers and more like little oatmeal creme pies. Seriously: it took a while for my palate to place the nostalgically resonant flavor, but the rich complexity of these twinkling squares possesses both the fattily processed, graham-ish sponge cake dough and creamily marshmallowed filling.

Now I just need to pair it with my favorite beer.

Unlike slush, the most hellish combination of powder and liquid known to tire, Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’s copious crystals of sugared snow perks up quite well with milk, as it boosts the sweet beverage’s vanilla stat and sending it shooting way up the doughsmith skill tree.

The cereal pieces, in turn, really start to take on the charmingly milquetoast ‘decadence’ of a dairy-dunked cookie, cracker, biscuit, and/or Vanilla Weasel. Broadly assessing the multitude of flavors at play in this lovely sugar lagoon, it’s like eating the condensed milk-soaked crust of a well-loved sugar cream pie. And I can think of no better compliment for what is undoubtedly the tastiest holiday cereal I’ve ever tasted.

Many Twitter users, as well as all the birds around my house, will know that I like using Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’s existence as a platform to pitch a hypothetical Gingerbread Toast Crunch cereal. But truly, that’s the only realistic way I could see General Mills leveling-up this seasonal cereal lineage any higher. By adding a gingerly nutmegged molasses accent to Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch’s near-impeccable cookie recipe, we could have a winter cereal worth sticking on top the tree.

After dipping it in gold, of course.

The Bowl: Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch Cereal

The Breakdown: Its tomes of flavorful depth border on literary, even when its sharp sweetness approaches overwhelming. But milk mends all wounds, and we’re left with a true sugar cookie doppelganger that seamlessly channels multiple kinds of creamed pies.

The Bottom Line: 9.5 Malt-O-Meal Chocolate Badgers out of 10