D.I.Y. BREAKFAST CEREAL

Well these are...brown.

With Brexit a little over a month away at time of writing, we have to face the fact that - if the worst happens and we end up crashing out with no deal - everyone's favourite brands might be slightly harder to come by for a bit due to the rampant stupidity of some ocean-going ham-faced fuckwits. So when little Timmy comes downstairs and starts demanding his usual cereal on March 30th, but there's nothing in the local shop apart from some withered turnips and a pervading air of disappointment, what are you going to give him to stop his incessant whining?

Well fear not! I've been experimenting with a load of alternatives to make delicious substitutes from things you might have in your cupboards that Timmy will never be able to tell apart from the originals - assuming he's a moron. You know, like when someone makes a vegan version of a meat-based meal, only in this case it's a complete waste of time and effort rather than a useful contribution. So no change from the usual for this blog there then.

Ingredients:

For this week's theoretically crunchy facsimiles, you'll need to stock up on the following primarily dun-hued goods:

Some wholewheat noodles
Some wholewheat vermicelli noodles (like the above, but thinner)
Some frozen sweetcorn
Some microwave popcorn
Some rice
A rubber mallet
A chopping board you're not particularly fond of
Some milk
The cardboard inside tube of a toilet roll (we've gone full-on Blue Peter this week!)

You'll also need your oven on for a fair while, so this is an ideal project for a cold day! Or I suppose you could put the heating on, which would probably be considerably more energy efficient and wouldn't mean you have to sit around the cooker all the time, but where's the fun in that?

Method:

There's a lot to make and do this week, not least of which being constructing the tools you'll actually need. First, get your rubber mallet and wrap some foil over the end. This is, of course, to prevent your lovely cereals taking on the taste of rubber. I'm sure some people would delight in such 'fetish flakes', but they'd probably also delight at being handcuffed in a dank basement while someone prods them with unmentionable devices in tender spots, so I'm not sure we should trust their tastes.

You don't have to write 'cooking hammer' on it, but if you have a lot of hammers lying about (you may be, for example, a slapdash bohemian carpenter) it might mean you don't pick up the wrong one.

For the other tool you'll need, chop off about half of your loo roll, then squash it so that it takes on an oval shape. Then just label it as below!

You can probably guess what this is for. Other than bog roll storage, that is.

Now we've got the necessary hardware, it's on to the foodstuffs!

Cornflakes

As I wasn't sure what would work best, I tried a three-pronged approach (in as much as the flat face of a hammer can feasibly count as a prong): hammering flat some frozen corn, hammering flat some popped popcorn, and hammering flat some unpopped popcorn. First off, I tackled the frozen sweetcorn. Just grab a handful and give them a good blatting, thusly:

You could probably use fresh corn cut off of a corn cob, but then what might happen is that you end up doing this blog a week later than you intended and in the meantime it goes a bit funny and slimy in the fridge and some of the kernels go a weird red colour, so frozen corn may be a better bet. *Ahem*

Scrape those on to something oven-proof like a baking sheet or, at a push, a welding mask, then move on to the popped popcorn. If you don't have any popcorn you could probably use some sort of polystyrene packaging material - it's about as pleasant to eat, after all. They can then join the party on the baking tray. Woohoo!

The one in the middle looks a bit like a heart! Awwww! (Although having said that, it's split down the middle and has a funny brown bit on one side that could be a tumour, so probably more urrgh than awwww.)

Finally, the unpopped popcorn, which came in this relentlessly demanding and alarmist bag that seems unduly concerned with ensuring your microwave has sufficient moral support during the cooking process.

Of course, faced with such an instruction, I immediately ignored it and unfolded the bag. You're not the boss of me, bag face!

Cut open the bag, and extract a few kernels. By the way, have you ever wondered what it looks like inside one of these microwave popcorn bags? Well wonder no more, because I photographed it. Fittingly, given popcorn is one of the dreariest and least appealing snacks imaginable, it's horrible!

I mean, look at it. LOOK AT IT. It's like you've found the egg sac of some horrible arachnid lurking in a corner of your loft.

As you might expect, these kernels are fairly hard. But what really surprised me was quite how hard. After a few whacks, not only had I split a grand total of none of them, I'd actually dented my chopping board. It then got worse - I eventually managed to split 2 of them slightly, but at the cost of my cooking hammer!

I bet Thor doesn't have this happen with Mjolnir. Then again, he may never have tried to split unpopped popcorn kernels, which it turns out are the hardest substance known to man. Or Asgardian.

Given so far I'd broken a mallet and made an impact crater in a solid lump of wood, I decided trying to eat these things after hardening them even more in the oven probably wasn't a great idea if I wanted to hang on to my teeth. Or at least hang on to them in my head, rather than in a small bag labelled 'Regrets' on my bedside table. So I abandoned corn type 3, and moved on to the next family favourite.

Shreddies

Being the only cereal that lets you pretend to be eating tiny potato waffles for breakfast, Shreddies are hence excellent. But how to recreate them? Well they're basically brown wheat grids, so it's really just a case of making some edible hashtags. To start with, boil up your thicker wheaty noodles.

To make these more malty like 'real' shreddies, I added a few spoonfuls of hot chocolate powder. Which went about as delightfully as it looks like it did.

Once these are done, give them a rinse to cool them down and then start laying them out on some foil on a baking tray. This, it turns out, is easier said than done as they tend to stick to each other, your hands, the foil and even the bloody fork I was using to space them out. But eventually, you should get something like the array below:

This looks like the end product of one of those shows where someone like Bill Oddie or Kate Humble tries their hand at old crafty-type jobs that hardly anyone does anymore with funny names, like 'chottling whippler' or 'futtock lamper'. The few ruddy-faced people in Britain who can still do it will also, inevitably, like folk music and have massive sideburns. Especially the women.

Tempting as it may be to 'write' some musical score on them with currants, leave them alone as they're done now. So rinse out your pan (or get another one out, if you're a 2-pan luxury type) and get ready for the king of dull breakfast cereals.

Shredded wheat

As we all know, shredded wheat is a cereal so unpleasant it's popular only with masochists or people such as cricketing mullet-sporter I. Botham, who used to be paid to pretend he liked it. In fact I think it's fairly likely that, if blindfold, you could eat the chaff straight out of the back of a combine harvester and be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and one of these abrasive wheaty oblongs. Or at least on taste grounds - unless you always eat your breakfast perched on heavy plant agricultural machinery, the juddering locale may give it away.

Anyway, pop your noodles in to boil to get this particularly unpleasant ball rolling.

It really is exactly like Trump's hair, isn't it? Sure, it's an incredibly easy joke, but you could glue this onto an orange balloon full of cold, racist soup and everyone would know immediately who it was.

Once cooked, rinse and cool and then get them onto your shredded wheat 'loom':

As a first attempt, I tried just lobbing them on and hoping they'd stick. This technique was the following: not successful.

Then, scrape that disaster off and start again, one arsing noodle at a time, winding them on like you're making a sock (look, I don't knit - maybe this is how you do it?).

Be careful when doing this so as not to dislodge any load-bearing noodles that cause the whole sodding thing to unravel.

Then, all that remains is to slide it gently off onto the baking tray and oh bloody hell it's all stuck and ended up in a big frigging pile anyway. At this point, abandon the shredded-wheat-o-tron and just wrap a bunch of noodles round a couple of fingers like you probably should have done in the first place. And use your OWN fingers, yeah?

Finally, sir? The rice.

Rice Krispies/Sugar Puffs/Christ knows

So for these, I read on some random hipster healthy living website that you can essentially 'pop' any dry grain much like popcorn in a pan - just heat it up with a lid on, and they should bloat up nicely like tiny organic zeppelins!

So far, so good...

However, what I'd forgotten to take into account is this: the internet is full of people writing absolute horse shit. So did this work in the end?

...oh.

Did it bugger. After a few seconds all the grains congealed, and then the whole lumpy mess proceeded to slowly burn until I gave up, took it out of the pan and broke it up into sort of cluster-type things. Luckily these sort-of vaguely looked like one of those nutty lumps of shite type cereal, so it wasn't a total loss. Just an approximate 94% loss.

Now all that's over with, pop your baking trays in the oven for about an hour or so at around 150 C so everything dries out like a slug on a salt lick in mid-August. Only hopefully with an end result that's less salty, and indeed slug-like.

Results

After cooking, everything was (a) nice and dried out and (b) miraculously not burnt. So here's what I'm going to call my 'bespoke breakfast buffet':

Well they look like breakfast cereals anyway. In that they're uniformly miserable.

Obviously, I didn't eat them just like that - I had a lovely (and traditional) accompaniment of milk. In part to give them a fair comparison to 'real' cereals by using the same taste conditions, but mainly because some of them were so dry I was worried they'd lodge in my throat and I'd choke to death otherwise. Like that time I foolishly tried to eat a pine cone for a bet*.

I hope you note I'm using a proper cereal spoon  where the shaft is a detachable milk straw - it's a coco pops one! Yes, I'm an adult.

Cornflakes first - how'd they fare?

Popcorn flakes

These tasted of barely anything - not even corn like. In fact, the closest taste equivalent is probably when you accidentally get a bit of paper in your mouth and swallow it, or if you could somehow eat the ghost of a digestive biscuit. So, utterly inoffensive - maybe a diet cereal? After all Special K is only 'special' in the sense that it's just full of air but costs more and you get less in a box (so in that context, very special indeed to Kellogg's shareholders).

Sweetcorn flakes

Now here it gets interesting - granted I may have made something that looks like a spoonful of coldsores, but get past that and they're surprisingly edible. They tasted VERY cornflake-like, only with an aftertaste of corn on the cob that has been cooked on the barbeque - and odd as that sounds, it wasn't unpleasant! So a definite pass here, albeit one that - regrettably -would almost certainly come to be known as 'scab flakes'.

Rice thingies

Shite. Next! What? Oh, OK, here's some more detail - they were chewy, weirdly bitter and claggy. Like Sugar Puffs only with no puff, no sugar and all dirty aftertaste. Not so much snap, crackle and pop as sigh, curse and pissssssss. And I'm not sure those guys would make suitable mascots for kids (especially pisssssss - I hear he has a criminal record).

Shreddies

Now here's a surprise. Despite being hilariously crunchy, as in 'eating dry spaghetti' crunchy (don't pretend you don't do it too), these genuinely tasted like shreddies. I dunno if it was adding the hot chocolate powder or what, but I could easily have eaten a whole bowl of these as they tasted more or less like a cereal would. Well I say easily, but they were a bit mouth stabby on account of quite how crunchy they were - I'd imagine not too dissimilar to how it would feel to attempt to eat a set square. A bit less sharp-edged and pokey though, and I bet they'd sell! Or I suppose you could always market them to stupidly macho oafs to show off how tough their leathery gobs were.

Shredded wheat

These didn't really look the part, resembling a miscoloured 3D printed model of Mr Messy more than much else, but taste and texture wise? Spot on. Absolutely spot on. I'm not saying it's an efficient process to make breakfast goods by any means (and lord knows it must take whoever make Shredded Wheat a bloody age to make a packetful, based on my admittedly nonsensical 'research'), but if you ever need a Shredded Wheat at a push, rest assured you can knock a couple out without too much grief. (Or you could just bite a loofah if you have one handy - even less grief, more or less the same taste.)

And there you have it - when we're all wandering the postapocalyptic landscape that was once Britain in a few months time, we'll at least still have all our breakfast favourites. Though in hindsight I probably should have checked what will be the most likely thing in short supply - if it's noodles, then you might be better off unpicking a shredded wheat and reversing the process!

NEXT TIME: 'THINGS' IN THE HOLE

*I didn't really do this. But if I run out of ideas for future blogs, who knows?