Cereal Killer

That title applies to the recipe in more ways than one.

Not only does it effectively decimate your reserves of cereal, it will also give you a fat and cholesterol overload if you don't share it with many others, and fast.

Because there are six eggs and two cups of sugar in this. Not to mention four-and-a-half cups of cereal and one cup of cashew nuts.

And when you consider the original recipe also had two bananas and a cup of coconut in it, this may just qualify to be called a 'somewhat lite' or rather, 'just a little liter' version.

The story, of course, begins the usual way - of good intentions gone amok. Travel brings me face to face with several Bircher Mueslis at breakfast time at the hotels I stay in. Impatient one that I am, I didn't dig deep but just hurtled ahead one fine day and bought a pack of fruity muesli. "My own recipe" for Bircher Muesli (dunk muesli in curds/yoghurt; overnight, if you can wait) soon palled and I was left with a packet of overpoweringly fruity-smelling cereal that I didn't know how to use up.

The words 'bake' and 'cake' kept popping up but the recipe proved hard to find. Was I going to be the pioneer and grind up cereal to bake a cake? It did seem so - all the "muesli" cakes I saw, the muesli only seemed to play a role in muffins or topping or bars; I wanted it to be a one-shot clean-up and continued searching - till I came across the above recipe. Funnily enough, that was also born out of necessity - the original recipe had called for vanilla wafers but there hadn't been any, and cereal it was!

The downside and the upside

Suffice it to say it was a hit. One person deemed it "first class" and the tub of cake I took to work today was cleaned out, with several compliments. They WERE being nice, but not being kind, so I think you can try it too, if you have cereal to get rid of, or even if you want a different kind of cake.

I'm no baker so I don't know what went wrong or right - the cake took almost two hours to bake and it was dense and moist.

Sugar - 2 cups sugar
Butter - 1 cup, softened
Milk - 1/2 cup
Fruity, honeyed muesli made of toasted oats and wheat flakes - 4.5 cups
Eggs - 6
Cashew nuts - 1 cup
Vanilla essence - 2 tsp
Lime juice - From 1 lime

Preheat oven to 150 C/ 300 F.

Cream sugar and butter until creamy.

Grind cereal as fine as possible.

Add to the creamed mix little by little. Mix.

Add eggs one at a time, mixing after each addition.

Add milk, mix. Add the vanilla and lime juice.

Fold in the nuts. Pour into a baking dish (sorry, I don't know the dimensions - I just used my largest as it seemed an enormous amount of batter) and bake till a knife comes out as dry as possible!

Cake Cereal/Muesli