About a year ago, when I was travelling, I found an ice cream place that had tons of flavors that I hadn’t seen before.  One that caught my eye was cereal milk ice cream.  I mean, I knew what cereal milk tastes like – I always drink my cereal milk when I’m done with it.  But I couldn’t fathom it when I ordered a scoop… and indeed, it’s the exact same flavor I remember from countless breakfasts.

I have eventually figured out, after much trial and error, how to get just the right taste out of it.  My usual ice cream base is about 3 cups in volume, and involves about 3/4 cup of sugar.  I cut that down to 1/3 cup sugar, make sure no vanilla is added, and then, I start blending.

The tricky part is to decide what cereal to use for the right flavor.  I wanted something that was just starchy and generically sweet, because you don’t necessarily know how other flavors will complicate things.  Sure, chocolate cereal is probably safe, but I don’t want to think about anything involving fruit.  I eventually settled on Captain Crunch.

Then, I decided that, to get the right flavor, I had to pulverize the cereal.  In a low-rent version of “Will It Blend?”, I ran about two cups of Captain Crunch through my blender’s highest setting in order to powder it.  Once it was roughly the consistency of flour, I mixed it into the ice cream base (which is lower in sugar because, dear God, I just put in two cups of Captain Crunch in there).  From there, I poured it into the ice cream machine and let technology take over.

It actually comes out very nice – smooth texture, just the right flavor, and best of all, you can bring it closer to the flavors you remember by throwing in mix-ins during the last five minutes of the mixing cycle.  Alternately, you can just make a soda float using this cereal milk ice cream in any variety of fruit-flavored soda.  Turns out that you do kind of get a Fruit Loops flavor when you have a scoop of this in a mug with orange soda. Fruit Punch soda reminds me of Crunch Berry cereal.

Oh, and best of all – when you use Captain Crunch for this, you can taste what it’s like to eat the cereal without lacerating your mouth because of how sharp Captain Crunch is.  That said… I may have killed my blender trying to turn Captain Crunch into powder.  It’s going to be a while before I can really make a recipe that calls for a blender.