Make 5-Ingredient Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal

Greetings, my beautiful lovelies. It's Emmy. How are you? It's great to see you and welcome back. Today, we are making a recipe that was absolutely irresistible to me and it is for homemade cinnamon toast crunch. One of the top tier cereals, I would say, of fun kids cereal along with Captain Crunch. I ate a fair share of cinnamon toast crunch and Captain Crunch in particular. Also, Cocoa Krispies, I ate quite a bit as well. Fruity Pebbles, I went through too. But these are the fun cereals that are sugared and sweetened and flavored and are just so addictively good that people buy them in large amounts. And today, we are gonna attempt to make them at home. I suspect it's going to taste better because we are going to be using better quality ingredients, namely the cinnamon. I am a huge fan of cinnamon and the cinnamon that I use is my favorite and it's just so potent and full of cinnamon flavor. The recipe that I'm gonna be using today comes from Ham L. Wiley's new book, Hello Home Cooking. And if it's anything like any of his other recipes, I think this is going to be a winner. So let's go ahead and get started. So besides being a huge fan of cinnamon toast crunch, the other reason why I wanted to make this recipe as soon as I saw it was the secret ingredient and it is pita bread. We are going to be making cereal out of pita bread. And I think it's absolutely genius because I often have a couple pitas left over from a recipe and then I do make pizzas with them, but I thought what else could we make with them? Cinnamon toast crunch. So Ham suggests in his recipe that we use pitas that are thinner, if at all possible. And this is what I found at my store. We need six of them and mine only came with five. So that's what we're gonna be using. And we're gonna cut them into cinnamon toast crunch size cubes. Now this pita of course is round. So we're gonna have pieces that are not perfect, but what do they call that technique in French cookery where you square things off? These round pieces would be discarded because once we cut them, they will not be perfect squares. Now, if we want to make our cinnamon toast crunch perfect, we would do the same. But if we're being, you know, frugal, we would save those pieces. But maybe for just pure aesthetics, we will put those pieces over there. Okay, so we will remove the triangle pieces because we want a cinnamon toast crunch that is square, or at least I do. Now, we're gonna lay these out onto a single layer and we're gonna dry these out in our oven. So again, I'm just going to remove the sides just to square things up a bit. And then half-inch strips will become half-inch squares. Now my oven is small, so I'm probably gonna have to do these in a couple batches. So now we're gonna take our pita squares, spread them out into a single layer like this, and bake these at 325 for about 30 minutes until they dry out but are not golden. We want them to be dry and receptive to the glaze that we'll be putting on top of these. Look at this, this is brilliant. Each pita, of course, because it's a pocket, is separating into its own little, two little halves. So as we toss them, that's great. We get double the pleasure. So into the oven these go for about a half an hour to dry out before we coat them. Okay, I'm going to toss these a little bit to separate them a little bit more. Half an hour? Jeez. So while the pita squares are toasting, we are going to make the cinnamon glaze. In a saucepan, we're gonna melt a stick and a half or three quarters of a cup of butter. Swizzle that around, don't have your heat too high so that doesn't burn. We're gonna add equal amount of brown sugar. And this should be packed brown sugar. Little sand castles. Recipe does not specify dark or light. Probably light I would imagine would be better, but I have dark. So that's what I'm using. Ooh, three sand castles. So we're gonna combine this together. We don't need any thermometers here. We are just going to melt the butter and make sure the brown sugar is dissolved. And once it starts to bubble vigorously, we can kill the heat. So Ham apparently came up with this recipe because his mom was a bit strict when it came to the Fun Cereals, as he calls them. Fruity Pebbles I think was my first initiation into the realm of Fun Cereals. I ate a lot of Fruity Pebbles. Then it was Cocoa Krispies for a little bit too. I kind of alternate between the two. But then the top tier Fun Cereal for me was Captain Crunch. Didn't like the peanut butter crunch, but I liked Captain Crunch with Crunch Berries. I know, I tried that as an adult. I'm like, really, child? And I said, yes, that was the one with the berries. I had it more recently. I'm like, my gosh, this cereal's salty. Delicious is what it was. All right, so it's bubbling. I mean, how could that not be good? Yeah. And the sugar is dissolved. It smells fantastic. Like butter and brown sugar. OG Cinnamon Toast Crunch was not buttery, as I recall. I need to get Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I might have to do a part two of this where I go to the grocery store and do a side-by-side. Right, I've turned off the heat. And now we're adding two teaspoons of cinnamon. This is my favorite cinnamon. Not a sponsored post. Two teaspoons of that. One bloop of vanilla. Gotta love that sound. And a pinch of salt, kosher salt. Mix that together. And this is what we are going to pour onto our lovely pita chips when they come out of the oven. It smells like the inside of a cinnamon roll. Like if you were to take a little nap in the middle of a cinnamon roll heart. Alrighty, lovelies, I'll be back when the pitas are ready. Alrighty, lovelies, we are ready to coat our mini toasts. They are so stinking cute. Look at these. Listen to them. They sound so crunchy and they look like little mini toasts. They're so stinking cute. So, much of the pita separated. And then as they bake, they further separated into the two halves, which I think are so ingenious in these perfect little mouse-sized bits of toast. So now, I'm going to put our toasts into a large bowl. Here is our beautiful syrup that we made. Glaze of the hot butter and brown sugar, cinnamon, and a bit of salt. Let's get friendly. Dump that all in. Mix it around to coat. Hubba hubba. Make sure everybody has a shellacking of that. So once we're coated, we're gonna return these back to the pans that we used earlier and distribute them in an even layer if possible. And then back into a 400 degree oven, we increase the temperature and bake them for an additional 10 minutes or so until everything is golden and bubbly. And then we're gonna let them cool off before we do the next step. So, spread them out as best I can here. Okay, back into the oven. Make sure you keep a really good eye on these. You don't wanna burn these. So, let's do that. Six minutes, not 10 minutes. Yeah, look at that. All right. All righty lovelies. Just took out the Cinnamon Toast Crunch from the oven and here we are. Just took the little Cinnamon Toast out and we're supposed to get them to a nice deep brown color, which is where we're at. Look at this. Isn't it gorgeous? I'm gonna give everything another stir to get everything coated with this glaze. And we need to let these cool for 10 minutes or so before we dust them. Gorgeous. Lovelies, I'm so excited about this. Listen to this crunch. Can you hear that? So, the cereal has been sitting on the baking trays cooling for about eight minutes. And listen how the sugar has caramelized and hardened. So crunchy. Now we're gonna add the cinnamon sugar. So, I've got a quarter cup of granulated sugar in here. Plain old, simply boring. And to that, we're adding a full teaspoon of cinnamon to that. Oh, this is so cinnamony. Three teaspoons of cinnamon for this entire recipe. Fantastic. So, now mix this together till we've got an even cinnamon sugar. And now, we're gonna dust these with the magical powder. Here we go. And we can add as little or as much as we like. So, we can do this to taste. Now, I'm gonna just stir this. Toss to coast for everyone to have some sugar on it. Oh, looks so good. Now, for the best part, which is to scoop a good portion of this into my bowl. Alrighty, lovelies. It is time to put this into my belly. Look at this. So beautiful. And listen to that crunch. That's Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Okay. Now, we are going to add our milk. Oh, yes. Look at that. Itadakimasu. Oh my gosh. That's insane. This tastes nothing like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. So good. This is a million infinite times better than Cinnamon Toast Crunch. First of all, I was not prepared for that crunch. Such a great substantial bite. You really feel it in all of your teeth. Crunches right through. You get the lusciousness of the milk along with that. But what makes this unbelievably better than Cinnamon Toast Crunch is that butter in there. Oh my gosh. It's so buttery and rich and caramel-y and candied. And the cereal stays very crunchy. I know it's only been a few minutes, but it's been soaking in there and it's so crunchy. I'm a super crunchy cereal person. I like my cereal very crunchy. I like to eat it immediately because I don't want it to get too soft. But this cereal, I think if you let it sit for about 30 seconds is ideal because that candy coating, the glaze that we put on there is very, very, very hard. So just letting it sit in there for just a few seconds softens the bite a little bit, but it's so good. The glaze coats every single piece of pita bread, enrobing everything in a coat of butter, cinnamon, and brown sugar. The milk is a perfect delivery mechanism for this sweet cereal. Cuts the sweetness a bit, but then becomes cinnamony and sweet itself. This is the best sweet cereal, fun cereal I've ever had. Let's take a moment and thank Ham's mom. Thank you so much for not letting him have fun cereal so that he could come up with this recipe. Cause this, oh my goodness. It's as if you took the best cinnamon roll, flattened it out, cut it up into little bits, baked it until it was crispy and then had cream on top. Cause that's essentially what the milk becomes for me. When you add the whole milk to this, it becomes extra rich cause all the cereal pieces are coated in the butter. You get this kind of creamy mouthfeel and flavor. I remember Cinnamon Toast Crunch being very light kind of a crunch, an airy kind of popped crunch. The base, as I remember, was more of like a rice cereal base and compared to this, flavorless. Bomb diggity. I got a rem, I got a plane to catch. So I'm gonna save a little portion of this and I will come back and we'll do a side-by-side comparison with real Cinnamon Toast Crunch. And then I can give you a full analysis. But for now, thanks as always for joining me. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you learned something. Also big thanks to Ham for sharing this recipe because it's absolutely fantastic. I will be checking out his book shortly. And yeah, thanks again for watching. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow me on social media, like this video, subscribe and I shall see you in the next one. Toodaloo, take care. Bye! Oh my gosh, now I need a cup of coffee.