This Dessert Gets 10x More Flavorful When You Pair It With Cereal

Many among us have enjoyed the occasional bowl of Lucky Charms or Cinnamon Toast Crunch as a delightful, impromptu dessert. But only a relative few have gone so far as to pair them with more conventional confections in a kind of sweet treat crossover for the ages. We aren't just talking about the zhuzhed up Rice Krispies treats that ran where the original squares once walked, either. We're referring instead to the temperature and textural mashup that is cereal and frozen yogurt (fro-yo).

Okay, this is not a totally unheard-of pairing. Your friendly, neighborhood fro-yo chain probably has at least a couple of cereal topping possibilities. Some now-shuttered operations even dedicated their entire businesses to the just slightly unexpected form. But it's still a marvelous combination to keep in your back pocket for whenever you want to dress up the last few spoonfuls in a pint, and your hot fudge and whipped cream have run dry. This topping also works just as well with the hard stuff scooped right from a cardboard container, or a DIY homemade soft serve. It has also been proven, by the law of culinary assumptions, that any cereal you have in the cabinet is guaranteed to bolster the flavor of whatever frozen yogurt it meets by at least as many times as there are ingredients in the dry good. And cereal, especially the sugary breakfast variety, is kind of known for having a lot of ingredients. So put some cereal on your frozen yogurt. You'll love it.

Just for fun, let us begin on the opposite end of the cartoony, toy inside, super sweet cereal spectrum, with good old Cheerios. Plain, everyday, grownup Cheerios. Pretty basic, right? But not when you join them with bananas. The very same bananas famed from a little creation known as the banana split, that is. Boom, there's your first flash of pairing brilliance right there: any frozen yogurt flavor that incorporates bananas, plus those super simple Cheerios for something reminiscent of an ice cream shop classic. Banana fro-yo is also particularly easy to make at home with just three ingredients, should you find yourself in a real dessert emergency. The addition of something like salted caramel makes it all even more dynamic, and illustrates how some otherwise unadorned flavors can layer terrifically to create exciting novelties.

Like a lot of noble food pursuits, once you've mastered the fundamentals, you can take more creative risks. The aforementioned Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch will obviously shine when sprinkled on vanilla, but one can also think outside the cardboard box. Why not nod to the former's stars and clovers with a marshmallow fro-yo, or the latter's could-be café notes with a coffee option? This is to say nothing of the wide world of botanical frozen yogurts that something like Fruity Pebbles can unlock. You can even mix and match all manner of Loops, Jacks, and Puffs in more of a parfait format, or simply pour them on as easy as fixing a bowl of, well, you know.