Gingerbread can do things to a man. Powerful things.

Its pillowy cookie coziness can make him devour a whole plates worth of gingerbread men with all the empathy of a bloodthirsty Xenomorph.
Its darkling molasses sweetness can make him suckle a used cookie cutter like a hungry baby’s favorite pacifier.
Its intricate blend of holiday spices can make him seriously grill a Home Depot employee for a price quote on building an actual gingerbread villa in the countryside—or at least a gingerbread armoire to hold all his Shrek DVDs.

Worst of all, gingerbread can make that cereal blogger scour the aisles of his local supermarket for any kind of gingery breakfast product—be it a cereal, oatmeal, or granola bar—he can write about. Even a breakfast biscuit—the kind that he, after triumphantly trafficking it like a footballer through the store’s pre-Thanksgiving, stuffing-clutching crowd, now munches on—would suffice.

So here he sits a-munching, transfixed by gingerfever. Is this him speaking to you, or the gingerbread? He thinks you should bow to your new gingerbread ov—

Oh hey guys, didn’t see you come in. That was weird—I just had a quick power nap, and now there’s an open package of belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits in front of me. Oh well, might as well give ’em a try, right?

From the start, these biscuits smell divine—just as buttery and doughy as the long-lost Kemp’s Gingerbread Man Ice Cream Sandwiches of my youth (my all-time favorite foodstuff). Granted, I’ve eaten perilously few breakfast biscuits in my life and reviewed exactly none, but there’s a magical first for everything, right?

Haha, wrong! Gotcha. I was just imitating a certain legendary holiday prankster. You know, The Gingerbread Man. I mean, someone here has to mimic a gingerbread man, since these biscuits sure aren’t doing it. Despite their name and beckoning aroma, which could easily beckon seafaring Greek sailors to their doom, these Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits just taste like cinnamon. A whole lot of cinnamon. And a bit of sweet graham flour.

By tasting almost exactly like the ursine love-child of a Teddy Graham and a Barnum’s Animal Cracker, belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits use buttery brown sugar and cinnamon sweetness to overpower any ginger or clove nuance they might otherwise have baked in. There’s a little bit of warm molasses darkness that builds over time, but it’s more “golden brown corn syrup” than “caramelized blackstrap goodness.”

Worse yet, these two-bite, four-to-a-pack belVita treats are much more cracker than biscuit. Seriously: by crumbling into shrapnel under even the meekest bite, these ovals would leave even a notoriously crumb-spewing Nature Valley bar mocking their fragility under pressure. Worse yet, they aren’t even fluffy enough to hold gravy!

Isn’t that every biscuit’s porous birthright?

Okay, I know I’m overreacting a little. BelVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits aren’t bad. In fact, they’re pretty good eaten like a haphazard cereal, as they quickly become creamy and cookie-like (that is, before they turn into a Moon Sand-esque paste).

Both Teddy Grahams and Barnum’s Animal Crackers are two of my favorite elementary school lunch classics, ad together their toasty sweet flavors make for a comfy and wholesome pair. I’m just upset they’re called “Gingerbread.” Snickerdoodle? Sure. Churro? Why not. Monkey Bread? Go bananas.

Just don’t toy with a gingerbread lover’s icing-encrusted heart like this.

So now, despite these Breakfast Bites’ promise of “hours of energy,” I just want to take a wistful nap and hope I wake up when my store stocks more gingerbread stuff. Nothing could go wrong in my sleep, right?

—erlord!

The “Bowl:” belVita Gingerbread Breakfast Biscuits

The Breakdown: With a nostalgic, if not particularly filling, flavor pair of cinnamon and graham, these biscuits nevertheless bear the weight of their name’s unfulfilled promise—a weight that, like most weights, they easily crumble under.

The Bottom Line: 5 Kemps marketers who are tired of hearing from me out of 10