Cinnamon Toast Crunch
The taste you can make
So today let’s make some cinnamon toast crunch, today’s recipe is 100% free of shrimp tails, and hopefully and milkshake duck. For those who live outside the US, cinnamon toast crunch is a breakfast cereal that is covered with cinnamon and sugar. It took a little ingenuity on how to make this, so let’s get started.
So first let's start with the toast part of the cinnamon toast crunch.
The Toast Part
For the base flour, I decided to go with 2.5 cups or 280 grams of whole wheat flour here, it added a little body to the cereal, and somehow felt pretty appropriate. If you want to go for an all-purpose flour here, I think that you probably could, but it may be less filling.
So we need to mix in some dry ingredients into this starting with 2 tablespoons or about 24 grams of sugar, as well as half a teaspoon or 3 grams of salt.
Now if you wanted to, you could add a teaspoon of cinnamon powder here, I didn’t because I didn’t want to overwhelm the flavor, or it could be because I completely forgot to add it (I guarantee to you that one of those statements is true).
Add that to our wheat flour mixture, and give it a good whisking, ensuring it’s evenly mixed. Alright, to our flour, we want to mix in 1 stick, ½ cup or 115 grams of cubed cold but not frozen butter. Now to make my life a little easier I am going to do this in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, but if you don’t have a stand mixer, don’t fret,
A food processor works really well here, or you can go old school use a manual pastry blender tool. The idea here is we want to add the cold butter cubes in little by little and just let the mixer do its business. After a few minutes, it will incorporate the butter until we have tiny clumplets. The butter should be pea-sized or smaller. Once it looks like this, it’s time to add some water.
At this point, we want to add in water but only 2 tablespoons at a time, the reason for this, is we don’t want an overly wet dough. Add 2 tablespoons in, let it mix for a while, then if add another 2 tablespoons, until it spontaneously comes together. In total, this should take about a third of a cup to a half of a cup depending on how dry the flour was. Once it does come together, pull it out of your stand mixer or food processor and place it onto a lightly floured surface.
give it a good press a rolling pin to flatten it a little, and cut the mega dough ball into three equally sized slightly smaller pieces of dough. Form each of them into a disk. I then wrapped mine in plastic wrap to help keep them, although this is optional. Place the three dough disks into the fridge for about 20 minutes, for the butter to reconstitute, making the disks firm up a little. 20 minutes later, pull one of the disks out, and begin to roll it out with the rolling pin. Rolling this to a thickness of about 2-3 mm, or about the thickness of a Nickel. Using a bench scraper, we can create a rectangle with somewhat even edges. Then using a pizza cutter or knife, begin to cut out squares. Now I am not a good line-making person, I am sure using a ruler or proper technique it is possible to create nice and uniform squares.
Once you have your little bite-size cereal pieces ready, transfer them to a foil-lined baking tray. Try to get them onto one even layer if you can, but as you can see I didn’t and they still turned out pretty ok.
Place them into a preheated 400F (205C) degree oven to bake for about 10-14 minutes, checking at the 10-minute mark to see how they are doing. Once they start to look a little crispy pull em out and pour them onto a cooled baking try to cool down and dry out a little. Meanwhile, you can start working on the second disk of dough.
This time I opted to try to cut them in the baking tray, this worked, but honestly didn’t make as big of a difference as I thought. Make sure when you do this though, that the baking tray is completely cool or you use a second baking tray. Bake the second and third batch just as before. Pouring them onto the baking tray to cool.
The Cinnamon Part
While the toast part of our cinnamon toast cools, let’s work on the cinnamon part. The coating to these is a simple cinnamon sugar, we need ¼ cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar, to which we wanna add 2 tablespoons or 16 grams of powdered cinnamon. Mix it up and set it off to the side.
Alright, now we need to add the last element to our cinnamon toast cereal, which of course is gonna require more sugar. We wanna make a simple syrup that will help us adhere the cinnamon sugar mixture to our cereal. To make the simple syrup, dissolve ½ a cup of granulated sugar into about ½ a cup of hot water. Mix it up until the sugar completely dissolves in the water. Now if you are worried about the amount of sugar in here, it’s not actually that bad, I only ended up using a small fraction of this syrup for the cereal. Now you could cool this down in the fridge, but I opted to use a few ice cubes to aid the process because the next thing we want to do is pour this into a clean spray bottle, one that hasn’t been used before, I don’t think window cleaner is the flavor profile we are going for here.
Now with the spray bottle spray just one side of the cinnamon toast crunch, making sure to get all of those little squares. Next spoon over the cinnamon-sugar mixture over the cereal. The syrup will help adhere the cinnamon so it sticks. I personally think it tastes best with one side coated, but you can opt for the other side as well, you after all are the chef john of how much cinnamon sugar you put on.
Once coated, pour into a bowl, and using both hands, just give em’ a toss. This will help shake off any excess as well as make sure all of the syrup-laden spots bond to the cinnamon sugar.
Afterwards, they should look like good and we are done!
Pour them into a nice bowl of milk and enjoy!
Condensed Recipe:
Ingredients:
2.5 cups or 280 grams of whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons or about 24 grams of sugar
half a teaspoon or 3 grams of salt.
1 stick, ½ cup or 115 grams of cubed cold but not frozen butter
1/3-1/2 cup of cold water
Sugar coating:
¼ cup or 50 grams of granulated sugar
2 tablespoons or 16 grams of powdered cinnamon
Simple Syrup Spray:
½ a cup of granulated sugar
½ a cup of hot water