Okay, so a little background on these. I had a party to go to and I had promised to make a treat. Well as luck would have it I was running very short on time, so when I finally got to the store I grabbed the old standby box of rice crispy cereal and bag of marshmallows and figured I would make it work. So I got home and realized that it would look pretty sad me bringing these lame rice crispy treats to a party when I'm making cute Valentine's treats for my blogger buddies to read about all the time. So I took a couple of minutes and tried to think how to make these rice crispy treats better. I mean Cake Boss builds robots out of rice crispy treats, these things have potential. Of course my mind was blank so I asked the husband for a little help, I swear he said put sprinkles on them, like that was revolutionary! Eventually however, I did come up with an idea, and it was, make them look like Valentine's Candy. Rice crispy treats are pretty easy to mold into whatever shape you want, and after this little experiment I've been thinking of all kinds of fun stuff to do with them. So here is a picture tutorial of how I did it. I promise they don't take very long, I did these in less than an hour.
Rice crispy treats recipe
6 c. rice cereal
1 bag marshmallows
1/4 c. butter or margarine
Melt your butter or margarine and add marshmallows. Stir until melted and then stir in cereal. Pretty easy right. Now onto shaping.
I used a little scoop to get the right amount, but a spoon will work fine too. Make sure to spray your hands with oil because it's really sticky. It can be a little hot, I have really tough hands and it didn't bother me, but just test a little to make sure you don;t burn yourself. Scoop out about 1 tablespoon of the rice crispy mixture and using your hands shape it in to whatever shape you like, I did balls, squares, rectangles, disks and hearts.
I tried to think about the shapes of boxed candies. As you are shaping kind of squeeze it together to make it stick.
Next, melt some chocolate or candy coating. Using a fork dip each piece of "candy" in the chocolate. Let dry on a piece of parchment or silpat liner.
Next decorate. I looked at some pictures of boxed candies online for an idea, but here is what I did. You want each different shape to be decorated different, like in a box of candy. I melted some white candy coating and put it in a squeeze bottle.
For the rectangle pieces I did a white loop design, for the squares I dipped one side in the white chocolate and then added chocolate jimmies, the hearts have white drizzled, the round ones have white drizzled and valentine's sprinkles and the disk just have chocolate drizzled. I put mine in the fridge in between dipping them and decorating to harden up the chocolate. After decorating they go back in the fridge.
Final step add some candy wrappers to complete the look. I wanted to put them in a heart shaped box, but due to my time crunch they just got put on a cute plate instead. They were a big hit with the kids, much more than I expect real chocolates would have been.
