Ahoy me mateys! Are ye ready t' get Crunch-a-tized?

This is my latest collaborative project, and I had the pleasure of working with a true gentleman and a scholar to get it nailed down. Mr. Burgundy and I have been trying out numerous concepts, from the enigma of FA Breakfast Cereals to the cereal destroying FW Hazelnut. There were some moments of pure joy, and some moments of sheer terror (looking at you Fizzy Sherbet). Let's jump into it.

Cap'n Burgundy's First Mate

|Flavor|Percentage| |:-|:-| |(TPA) Brown Sugar|0.35%| |(CAP) Cereal 27|3%| |(FA) Cookie|1.25%| |(FLV) Cream|0.75%| |(OOO) Cream/Milky Undertones|1.5%| |(FA) Forest Fruits|0.75%| |(TPA) Strawberry (ripe)|1.5%| |(CAP) Super Sweet|0.25%|

This project started out with my constant harassment of Mr. Burgundy to come up with an awesome Captain Crunch recipe. After trying Toasted for the first time, I knew that he was the person to beat when it came to cereal profiles. I was talking with him on Discord and through a miscommunication, I found myself staring at the first Breakfast Bowls profile. So I "asked politely" to help him work on it, and make it into something truly spectacular. The first major hurdle for this recipe was finding a replacement for TPA Crunchy Berry Cereal. It was far too soapy when used as the main flavor, so I was in charge of using my nose to recreate it.

Getting the general idea across was fairly easy, I went through all of my flavors until I found something that contained the main note of Crunch Berries, and that was FA Forest Fruit. Then came the more difficult task, adding the "artificial" brightness. My first idea was to use VT Fizzy Sherbet. It has the same bright lemon-lime thing that's going on in CAP Lemon-Lime and various other flavors. There were two major problems with my logic here though. The first issue is that bright artificial quality is probably what turns TPA Crunchy Berry Cereal into soap. The second, is that it's "fizzy"... If there is one thing to take away from this story, it's to never use VT Fizzy Sherbet in a cream profile, except for maybe an egg cream.

Then we finally realized we weren't trying to recreate TPA's flavor, we were trying to fix it. So we started going through numerous other fruits, and kept working on that until the project was almost finished. Things like dragon fruit, lemon, and apricot were all "okay", but we finally got around to exploring one of Mr. Burgundy's early ideas to use Strawberry and it was the missing link.

Next, we started trying out various cereal options. My first idea was to add a graham cracker flavor in place of Brown Sugar and FA Cookie, and it failed miserably. I don't have FA Breakfast Cereal or PUR Cereal, but Mr. Burgundy was inspired to see if they could work to add a fruity/grainy cereal bridge flavor when used in conjunction with the Cereal 27 or FA Cookie. Also a bad idea. My final terrible idea was to try consolidating the FA Cookie and Brown Sugar again with CAP Sugar Cookie, creating what was quite possibly the second largest monstrosity next to Fizzy Sherbet Cereal.

The real breakthrough came with changing up the milk base. We were working with the traditional combinations of FA Cream Fresh, FA Meringue, FW Hazelnut, etc. for most of this process. Then we finally had a discussion that led to FW Hazelnut being thrown out, and FLV Cream and OOO Cream/Milky Undertones moving in. One of the serious trouble makers in the recipe, which I'm still coping with, was FA Meringue. Normally it does a fantastic job of adding a sugar coating to the cereal and blending it with the milk a bit, but in this case it was destroying a lot of the texture and separation.

So that's the general story of how this recipe came to fruition. I really hope you give it a shot, and please let us know if you enjoy it as much as we do.

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