Give Your Coffee A Cereal Milk Twist With Your Cocktail Shaker

It seems that everything early 2010s is making a comeback these days, and there's no reason why that trend shouldn't include food and drink. Foodies who lived through the Indie Sleaze era will certainly remember the cereal milk craze, started by pastry chef Christina Tosi while working for David Chang's Momofuku restaurant group, before she eventually opened her bakery Milk Bar in New York's East Village. 

Tosi used cereal milk as an ingredient in a variety of desserts, from panna cotta to soft-serve ice cream, and the trend caught on like wildfire, inspiring dupes far and wide.

If you missed the cereal milk train the first time around, or you're just longing for the days of opaque tights and the Arctic Monkeys, listen up: One Instagram drink influencer has shared an idea you might want to steal — a cereal milk iced coffee drink that seems fairly involved, but can easily be stripped down for a daily beverage, too.

It starts by adding cereal and milk to a cocktail shaker, which you then shake to flavor the dairy before straining the cereal pieces out. It's a clever and easy way to make cereal milk that you can use in your coffee or tea — or, if you're feeling particularly creative, you can take a page from Tosi's book and try experimenting with using it in desserts.

After you shake and strain the cereal milk, pour it into a glass, then you could follow the Instagrammer's lead and top it with a giant peony-shaped piece of cotton candy and pour coffee over it, which leads the pouffy dessert to melt into the glass. 

But, of course, you can skip the cotton candy magic altogether while still making cereal milk all on its own and using it to flavor your coffee for the next few days. It'll do the double duty of sweetening your coffee while making it creamy and delicious.

For reference, Tosi's original cereal milk recipe was quite a bit more complex; it involved toasting cornflakes in the oven, steeping them in milk, then pushing the mixture through a sieve to filter out the solids. Using a cocktail shaker to quickly turn your milk of choice into cereal milk is a lot more realistic for most of us who haven't yet had our morning caffeine to wake us up.

One of the brilliant things about the concept of cereal milk is how customizable it is. Tosi's original recipe used cornflakes, while she later tried variations with other kinds of cereal. The IG reel for cereal milk coffee uses Fruity Pebbles, which creates a pretty lavender color when all is said and done. If there's a different kind of cereal that piques your interest, go ahead and give it a try — a Cinnamon Toast Crunch cold brew doesn't sound half-bad. And of course, the milk choice is up to your discretion as well. There's no reason you can't swap out dairy for oat milk or almond milk, for instance.

Cereal milk isn't itself a dish, it's an ingredient — but one that you can use in a plethora of ways. You can splash a little into your morning coffee (hot or iced), or if you're a seasoned home barista, steam it and add espresso for a cereal milk latte or cappuccino. Just be warned, once you (re)introduce yourself to cereal milk, you may get hooked — after all, there's a reason 2010s queen Taylor Swift still celebrates her birthdays with a cereal milk cake.