When someone asks you to recount a favorite moment of your life, it can be nearly impossible to pin just one down. When you got your first dog? Sitting on a park bench at 4am with your girlfriend? Overthrowing the facist regime behind the Silly Bandz trade in middle school? It can seem impossible to find just one memory that stands out but deep down, we share a collective one that has to be up there:
It’s 10am on a Tuesday, sometime in February. You’re eight, maybe nine, and running just enough of a temperature that your mom has decided you can stay home from school today. All morning you’ve been sitting in your parents’ bed, watching reruns of the Suite Life of Zack and Cody, while slowly eating a giant bowl of Lucky Charms. You take one final scoop before realizing that you’re all out of marshmallows –as well as the boring stuff they decide to put in with them. All that’s left now is a bowl of milk with the dregs of Charms that once were. You can see tiny pieces of colored God-knows-what and sugar floating in the bowl still. Holding it up, you sift the bowl around, like a prospector searching for gold, before placing it to your lips and downing it, not like a prospector searching for gold.
Heaven. Nirvana. Valhalla. They all pale in comparison. You’ve just had a sip of ambrosia. A fleeting taste of all that is holy and good in the world. If they liquefied the joy puppies bring, it would taste like this.
It’s a feeling we’ve all tried to reclaim but once the Charms-colored glasses have been taken off, there’s no putting them back on. Or, at least that was what I thought until I had been to Milk and Cream Bar, an Ice Cream shop located in Soho that makes Cereal-infused soft serve. Milk and Cream is a fascinating little shop that’s tucked away in Manhattan just by Little Italy. They’ve been running for just a handful of years now and are truly an ice cream place like no other.
We at @nychungry had a chance to visit just this past weekend and let me say that I am personally still glowing from it. With a basis of soft serve, milkshakes and actual bowls of cereal (yeah that’s right, and you can get two different kinds in one bowl!) and a bounty of every amazing children’s cereal to choose from, Milk and Cream bar is a wet dream for any cereal or ice cream lover. After years of chasing the taste of what’s at the bottom of a bowl of cereal, I can comfortably say that I’ve found something better. Something even more delicious. Imagine, if at nine years of age, you had just had the foresight to pop that bowl of cereal in the freezer for a good hour or two before nipping in. Life would have never been the same.
So what’s the hold up? Go on and reclaim your missing childhood with a stop by Milk and Cream Bar!