“They’re called cereal bars, okay? It says it right on the box! I promise, I am not a monster!” I shout to the non-existent critics who haunt my nightmares and claim that my breakfast cereal blog has strayed too far from its flaky roots.

I’m not going to feel bad about reviewing Trader Joe’s conversationally named “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” pumpkin breakfast bars, because A) It’s the witching season so there are no rules and B) I already reviewed these bars’ little brother, Pumpkin Spice Nutri-Grain bars, so I want to compare the pair.

Note: I call Pumpkin Spice Nutri-Grain the little brother not just because TJ’s bars have existed longer, but also because of each bar’s respective aesthetic. Trader Joe’s pumpkin bars seem like the hippy college student who dropped out to join the Peace Corps, while Nutri-Grain bars feel like the 1st grader who’s still making fuzzy spiders out of pipe cleaner pieces.

While you digest that mental image, I’ll start digesting this “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” bar.

Here we see an adorable family portrait: “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” (left) and Pumpkin Spice Nutri-Grain bar (right) refused to sit any closer to each other than this, because as brothers, they have to pretend that they hate each other.

While I compared Pumpkin Spice Nutri-Grain bars to a pumpkin pie breakfast burrito, Trader Joe’s pumpkin bars are more like pumpkin pie calzones. Instead of having a flaky, spiced pie crust shell, “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” bars have a much softer, doughy exterior. This shell tastes like a warm blend of brown sugar, wheat, honey graham, and pleasantly browned butter. It makes me want to start a chain of pizzerias that use this crust formula for Halloween-themed dessert pizzas.

I’ll call it, “Count Dan’s Haunted House of Sweet, Sweet Scare-inara Sauce.”

But you may be asking: does the pumpkin sword sheathed inside this doughy scabbard taste just as good? Well that depends on whether you like apple pie as much as you like pumpkin pie. The pumpkin filling inside every “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” bar is made of both pumpkin and apple powder. I could definitely taste both, as the juicy apple cider tartness and cinnamon-spiced pumpkin starchiness blended together into a sweetly puckering whole.

It’s kind of like walking into the kitchen before Thanksgiving dessert, only to catch your freshly baked apple and pumpkin pies sloppily making out on top of the oven. It’s a little weird and a little unexpected, but I sure as heck can’t stop watching it.

And I can’t stop eating these Trader Joe’s pumpkin bars, either: they just taste so different from every other tired pumpkin product out there. They’re like a breath of fresh air in a room that’s been burning the same pumpkin spice Yankee Candle for 2 years. What makes them even better is that, instead of the creamy pie filling you’d find in a Pumpkin Spice Nutri-Grain bar, the pectin in Trader Joe’s bars turns their filling into jelly.

Why is this important? Because it makes every bar taste like a remixed pumpkin PB&J sandwich, with pumpkin butter and apple jam slathered on sweet honey wheat bread. And if I ever become a professional disc jockey, you better believe that my DJ name will be “M.C. Pumpkin PB&J Remix.”

The pumpkin flavor in “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” will definitely be too light for any pumpkin purists, and even I wish it were stronger. On a scale of 1 to “jack-o-lantern on head,” the pumpkin spice factor here is only about a 3. But for marrying fall’s two most iconic pies (sorry, pecan pie) inside of a single, deliciously doughy tube, Trader Joe’s deserves mad props.

Plus, these bars’ non-crumbliness means that I can slice ’em up and eat them like Halloween California Rolls. Could you please pass the soy sauce…err, I mean whipped cream?

The “Bowl:” Trader Joe’s “this pumpkin walks into a bar…” Cereal Bars

The Breakdown: These bars taste like cylindrical, pumpkin and apple PB&Js, which is enough to draw me to them like trick-or-treaters to the house that gives out king-sized candy bars. But if you’re looking for rich pumpkin spice flavor, then I’m sorry, Linus: your Great Pumpkin is in another patch.

The Bottom Line: 9 Smucker’s Un(pie)crustables out of 10