
The squares come in at full Toast Crunch strength: dense, loud, and solid all the way through the first spoonful. Then the flavor shows up. In milk, a full-bodied chocolate hits first, with real cocoa weight behind it. Right behind it comes a flash of cinnamon sweetness, the signature move Cinnamon Toast Crunch has been making since 1984. The two take turns instead of fighting, which is the whole trick, and it’s executed perfectly. Flavor payload: 10.0.
The milk turns into Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk. That’s a compliment, and it’s also the catch. It drinks almost exactly like the cinnamon-sugar milk the original leaves behind, with a slight hint of chocolate underneath. It’s great milk. For a cereal with hot chocolate on the box, though, we wanted more cocoa coming through, and it stops short. Milk transformation: 9.0.
Bowl longevity is where this box surprised us. The cocoa coating sticks to the squares deep into the bowl instead of rinsing off in the first few bites, so the late spoonfuls still taste like chocolate. Bowl longevity: 9.0.
Eat this dry and it’s a different cereal. The cinnamon sweetness disappears entirely, and the cocoa coating does the squares no favors without milk. Dry versus milk is night and day. Dry snackability: 6.5.
The milk loses a point too. It’s standard Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk with a faint cocoa accent. Good, just not hot chocolate.
Cereal is meant to be eaten with milk, though, and nobody buys a hot chocolate cereal to eat it out of the box. The dry score stays on the card. It doesn’t come off the overall.
We weren’t sure about this one at first. With milk, it’s a 9.3 and the best chocolate-cinnamon bowl we’ve had, and it earns a Hall of Crunch designation. ADD MILK. BECOME A BELIEVER.
Imagine a strawberry shortcake decided to have a sit-down meeting with corn flakes. The meeting went well.
German Choco Krispies hit different. Bigger flakes, deeper chocolate, milk turns into a stein of cocoa.
A fast-food chain made a cereal. We had to. Tastes like a churro got into a fight with a Krave.
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