Recipe Lab: My kid loves this homemade cinnamon pita crunch more than the store-bought sugary cereal | Canada Voices

The objective

A “treat” breakfast cereal that is a convincing dupe for the store-bought kind

My daughter cannot walk down a grocery store’s snack or cereal aisle without her eyes lighting up like a slot machine.

She eats her fair share of sweets, including store-bought stuff, but whenever possible we opt for homemade. I feel very smug that she prefers the cookies I make over Oreos or Bear Paws, that she rejects packaged granola bars in favour of the ones her grandmother bakes, and that at birthday parties she leaves the cloying frosting on grocery store slab cakes untouched. This is the one area I don’t mind raising a snob.

As for the sugary cereals that beckon to her from their cartoon-covered boxes, I didn’t know it was possible to create an enticing alternative – until I opened Hello, Home Cooking by Ham El-Waylly, chef and co-owner of Brooklyn’s Strange Delight.

Growing up, El-Waylly’s mom only let him eat sugary cereal in the summer, when school wasn’t in session, so he made his own version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch using pita to scratch the itch the rest of the year. An evolved version of that recipe is in the book, and El-Waylly says he now prefers it to the one General Mills makes.

Would my daughter prefer it, too?

The process