The Best Part of Breakfast Cereal

America has achieved great things: Christopher Walken, faking the moon landing, the invention of that turnstile thing at amusement parks so that we're spared the awfulness of not knowing how many people visited that day... but there is still a long way to go in one area, and that area is making sure that I can have a bag of snacks made up entirely of the marshmallows from cereal.

Not the cereal, mind you, just the marshmallows: Those crispy little marshmallows that are supposed to be shaped like ghosts or moons or just marshmallows, but nobody cares anyway because we're all just eating around the Alpha-Bits to get to the Cereal Marshmallows, which are The Best Part of Breakfast Cereal.

Despite that, despite the fact that everybody in the entire world is just picking around in the bowl trying for that elusive all-marshmallow spoonful, or at least hoping that there's not too many Boo-Berries in with this mouthful of marshmallows, Big Cereal continues to frustrate the public by not putting in more marshmallows and not selling them separately.

I finally decided that I'd just go ahead and try to make my own cereal marshmallows, using time-tested scientific principals like "Buying a bag of marshmallows." But I'm no food scientist, so my ideas really ended there (I'm more of a theory guy, after all) and the best I could come up with was to leave the marshmallows in my cupboard, slightly open, for a couple of months and see what happens.

What happens is:

A. They don't spoil; that's kind of freaky, but
B. They also don't get crispy, which is disappointing.

I used the stale marshmallows to make some Rice Krispie bars Saturday, which is when I learned the third thing that happens, which is:

C. They don't melt fully and leave big blobs of marshmallows in your bars, which is
D. Not a bad thing.

So that's where my experimentation has left me: I've got some Rice Krispie bars, but I still don't have cereal marshmallows that I can eat without having to pick out the cereal, and why don't I have that? They made Cap'n Crunch Crunch Berries once with all berries (which is just wrong; it's the Cap'n Crunch that makes the cereal good in the first place; I always ate around the berries, too) and they've started putting the marshmallows into all sorts of cereals where they didn't used to have them, so where's my "Marshmallow Cereal?" Why can't they make, say "Lucky Charms" with only the Charms and no Luckys?

They could even sell them separately, little bags of marshmallows hanging in the cereal aisle to be sprinkled on the cereal as you eat them -- that way, I could make my own cereal with marshmallows, if I chose, like "Wheaties With Marshmallows" (I could pretend the marshmallows were little Olympic Gold Medals.) They would be a perfect compliment to the little bags of cereal dust I've advocated before.

It's not as though I'm out in left field on this; according to one website which I found while trying to locate pictures to sprinkle through this entry, like marshmallows in cereal (ah, simile, the lazy writer's best friend!), marshmallows are actually candy. Of course, that website has to go and wreck it by also saying that marshmallows are "mucilaginous," which makes them sound gross. Look, science, making up velociraptors is one thing -- but don't you try to take down marshmallows by using disgusting words to describe them. Why not say they're Delici-aginous? What's wrong with that word, aside from the fact that I just made it up?

That same site also tells you how to make your own marshmallows, but... why? They cost about a buck for a bag of more than you can comfortably eat in one sitting (trust me on that one), and who do you think you're going to impress with homemade marshmallows? Hi, Pope, come on in! I've got some homemade marshmallows here!

I would think that there would be a serious amount of money to be made just bagging up those little cereal marshmallows and putting them in the snack aisle, the way they're doing with so many other things that did not used to be snacks, like Cheerios. I, at least, would buy them, so there's a built-in market already.

That kind of thing-- a bag of tiny crispy cereal marshmallows -- would be a perfect movie snack, too. Movie snacks already feature things that you can't really get anywhere else, or at least never would. Does anyone buy JujuBees outside of a movie theater?

As a side note: All my life, I called all those kinds of candies "JujuBees." Then I got married and
was told by Sweetie that JujuBees are a particular kind of Juju candy, the "bees" that taste like licorice. She claimed that the other kinds are all Jujyfruits, not JujuBees." Sweetie's a detail person; I try to see the big picture, which is this: Jujubees are a terrible candy.

So I live in a society where people are free to buy Jujubees and eat them despite the fact that they taste like candle wax and stick to your teeth, but I can't kick back to watch TV with a bowl made up entirely of Cereal Marshmallows, The Best Part of Breakfast Cereal. That seems wrong, and it's not my fault; I'm out there trying (see my experiment, above.) Plus, I even have a name for them already: CrunchMallows. So I've done, like 90% of the work. Now it's the rest of your turn. I'll expect results by next week.

UPDATE: I got results. Don't tell me America doesn't work, commie.




If you like cereal as much as The Best of Everything loves it, check out The Best Breakfast Cereal, or go find out who is The Best Breakfast Cereal Spokesman.

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!






Date Quiz:

Date Quiz
by

brianefp

Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle