When I heard there was a Snickerdoodle Pop-Tart out, I was excited because I happen to love cookies, and I figured it’s hard to screw up something like cinnamon and sugar, right? They sounded more up my breakfast alley than flavors like Peach Cobbler or Everything Bagel. Turns out I was wrong. From my first glance at this box, I feared something had gone awry. The packaging couldn’t be more lackluster, and it represents the contents accurately.

Straight out of the foil, these Pop-Tarts are too soft and crumbly to hold themselves together. One was splitting so badly along multiple fault lines that it could definitely never be placed in a conventional toaster. I thought it was a fluke, but upon picking up the other one, it became clear that it, too, was ready to fall apart unless I used the utmost care and immediately set it down. They’re sprinkled with coarse-grained sugar, which is nice in many applications but not what one typically rolls snickerdoodles in. These sugar pebbles atop the sandy-bordering-on-gray pastry base make for an ugly appearance, but there’s no reason to hold that against them just yet.

I’ll eat Pop-Tarts any way they come to me, so I set about snacking on discrepant pieces of the first pastry as an initial test while I waited for the second to toast (with a silent prayer it didn’t collapse in the process). They taste pretty generic, and I can’t keep them from further falling apart in my hands. I’m missing the classic tang you’d typically find in a snickerdoodle, usually present thanks to cream of tartar that adds flavor and chew to the cookie. The filling is weirdly viscous and kind of gluey, like what you’d find in a not great pecan pie.

The toasted pastry emerged almost slightly burnt in places, but it managed to only lose one corner to crumbliness. The darker toasted parts of this remind me of burnt marshmallows, which isn’t normally a bad thing but isn’t anything I associate with snickerdoodles. The more I ate of both the toasted and untoasted tarts, the more both seemed to be mostly flavored like cinnamon-y marshmallows.

I refuse to believe this is a thing that anyone does, but because the box always claims that you can enjoy them frozen, I threw one in the freezer to complete the experience. The cooling muted some of the marshmallow flavor, but the filling is even less agreeable when it’s cold, stretching as you pull off a piece and slowly contracting in an unappetizing fashion.

Everything about this flavor seems thrown together, possibly by someone who’s never eaten a snickerdoodle or made a Pop-Tart. They aren’t bad necessarily, although the filling texture is off, but there’s nothing to really set them apart or make them worth trying. They could as easily have been called “Sugar and Cinnamon” or “Cinnamon Roll” or maybe “Cinnamon Corn Syrup” as “Snickerdoodle,” and because I consider the regular Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon version to be top-tier, it makes me wonder why they’d bother with these.

Purchased Price: $3.49
Size: 8 count box
Purchased at: Jewel-Osco
Rating: 5 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (2 pastries) 380 calories, 11 grams of total fat, 4 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 440 milligrams of sodium, 67 grams of total carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 24 grams of total sugars, and 4 grams of protein.