Here’s a little fun fact for all you Bible fans—something King James won’t tell you. The original forbidden fruit? Oh, it wasn’t an apple. Nope, wasn’t a grape, a fig, or even one of Eden’s finest snozzberries, either. It was just a big ol’ hunk of raw cookie dough, hanging off the tree.

So God was like, “Hey now, don’t eat those, you could get sick!” But the serpent goes, “C’moooon, salmonella occurs in fewer than 1 out of 20,000 eggs!” Long story short, God had to kick Adam and Eve out of the garden because they kept vomiting everywhere.

Harsh, maybe, but you ever smell a burning puke bush? Terrible for heavenly PR.

Since then, fear of cookie dough consequences has rarely stopped anyone from indulging in this original sin-full sweetness. In fact, this carnal compulsion is so deeply human that companies have innovated all kinds of ways to manufacture, safe, edible cookie dough. Including this newest entry into the Krave franchise of cereals: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave.

Now I love Krave (unlike many, I know), and I adore chocolate chip cookie dough, so my expectations for this cereal are higher than the maximum preheat temperature on my oven. Plus, this is the first explicitly chocolate chip cookie dough cereal—the underrated Keebler Cereal comes closest—but if anyone can pull it off, it would be the brilliant Kelloggian minds behind Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Pop-Tarts.

Okay, I totally dig Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave. Why? Because I already dig regular Krave, and this stuff is only like, 5% different in flavor.

Let’s get one element out of the way: the itty-bitty chocolate chips speckled on each Krave pillow contribute nothing to the overall taste. All they manage to accomplish is inspiring tons of comments on Twitter and Facebook from people who think they make the cereal look moldy, peppered, or ant covered. While I never saw this stuff that way before, I sadly can’t unsee it.

Nor is there anything different about the filling inside each multigrain biscuit. It’s just the same ol’ chocolate found in your garden variety anthill—I mean Krave. Krave! That said, such a combination between the hearty, graham-like shell and a kiss of smooth, milky chocolate makes Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave delightful and rightfully crave-able.

That aforementioned 5% flavor difference comes in the form of a buttery, vanill-ish sheen that hits your tongue at the start of every bite. At first, this gave me shudder-some pause, as it’s pretty much the same vanilla sweetness that’s ruined countless cereals, from Funfetti to Dunkaroos.

However, the more Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave I ate—and I’m 95% through the box as I write this—the more I started to see the vanilla as a complementary positive, not a damning negative. If you design your entire cereal around this buttery basting, it’s gonna turn out as bland as a grocery store birthday cake. But used intelligently, like Kellogg’s has here, this confectioners’-sugary accent can bring new depth to a flavor as familiar as Krave’s.

True to its cookie’d namesake, Chocolate Chip Cooke Dough Krave thrives in milk. Milk washes away that distinctive Krave aftertaste that turns some people off, and it more cleanly blends the buttery bits with the satisfying shell and chocolatey core.

Milk, too, really brings out just how much these Krave pieces look like The Cheat, Strong Bad’s friend and pet from the Homestar Runner webtoon-iverse. This is a resemblance I couldn’t get out of my head, so I went to social media about it—prompting all those moldy observations and, most memorably, a response from SB himself:

Is this what you’re seein? This is where my brains go. pic.twitter.com/vstyg6xOlU

— Strong Bad (@StrongBadActual) February 26, 2021

Overall, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave is a worthy new entry for the cereal series, even if it hits the cookie element a little harder than the chocolate chips or the dough. If nothing else, CCCD Krave is a lesson in how subtle changes can successfully shape up cult classic tastes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got about a dozen dozens’ worth of Hail Marys to recite if I want to repent for how much of this forbidden breakfast I’ve scarfed down.

The Bowl: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Krave Cereal

The Breakdown: Basically just standard chocolate Krave with a glaze of buttery vanilla, CCCD Krave is still a fun twist on an old favorite that any Krave fan will enjoy.

The Bottom Line: 9 Cheat Commandos O’s lawsuits out of 10