Candy Critic Dessert Club – A Classic Square - Rice Krispie Treats

When I was a kid Rice Krispie Treats were a complete mystery to me.  At the very least I completely misunderstood how they were made.  I don't think my mother, or the media helped in my misunderstanding either.  Until I was a teenager, I always assumed that Rice Krispie Treats were really complicated to make.  Maybe they were easy to burn, or at the very least there must have been some kind of added ingredient that I was completely unaware of.  The fact that Kellogg's started selling Rice Krispie Treats pre-made didn't help either. After all if they were easy to make, why sell them pre-made?

There is a little truth to this, there is a trick, however it's not a skill as much as an ingredient.  The trick to making Rice Krispie Treats is butter, and best not to cut back on it.  Butter is what keeps your marshmallows from sticking to everything, as well as adding just a slightly salty flavour, and this is a good thing.  As any great dessert aficionado will tell you, to make sweeter better, add salt.

The ingredients:

About 20 large marshmallows
3 cups of Rice Krispies cereal
1.5 tablespoons of butter

This might prove to be a very short recipe, as I mentioned before, it's super easy.  First coat a baking pan or pie plate with butter.  Set this pan aside, you'll need it  later.  Now take the 1.5 table spoons of butter and melt it in a non-stick pot.  Make sure to move the butter around, and try to coat the sides of  the pot as well. Once the butter is melted, turn your stove to a medium to low heat.  Add the  marshmallows to the butter.  This is probably the trickiest part of the whole recipe, stir the marshmallows.  Keep stirring until your marshmallows go from 20 individual marshmallows into one giant glob.  You want to be sure that there are no lumps left.

Once the marshmallows are melted, add the Rice Krispies.  If for some reason you don't have, or don't like Rice Krispies, you can pretty much use any cereal you want.  Even granola would work.  Add the cereal to the marshmallow glob and turn off the heat.  Stir the cereal into the marshmallow until it's evenly distributed.  Now take the marshmallow/cereal mix and dump it into the buttered pan from earlier.  With a wet spoon (or wet fingers) push the marshmallow cereal mixture into the pan.  Once it's fairly level, let  the Rice Krispie Treats cool, and voila, you're done.

To say that this recipe is  fool proof is a bit of a lie.  I've seen these fail twice, and once was by my hands.  Keeping your heat low is the first important step.  Marshmallows love to melt, but once they go past melting, they burn.  So keep the heat low so you don't get to the burning stage.  My failure with these happened with stale marshmallows.  If you have marshmallows that have been sitting in your cupboard since the first Ghostbusters movie came out, they won't work.  They'll just turn into a hot sticky brown, lumpy mess.

If you really hate marshmallows, some people use other sticky treats to make these.  Caramel cubes would work well, so might some syrups.  In fact a maple syrup  square with granola might be pretty tasty.  The trick in all cases is keep the temperature low, and make sure nothing burns.  If you're using a liquid syrup (maple or otherwise) you may have to use a candy thermometer to make sure you don't overheat the syrup into a rock hard lump.

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Candy Critic Dessert Club – The Simplest Recipe Ever - Banana Ice Cream

This is probably the simplest dessert you'll ever make, it's not necessarily a fast dessert, particularly because you have to wait for it to chill, but the ingredients can be very simple.  The part where this recipe can get complicated is totally in your control.  The base ingredient, banana, is all you "need", anything after that is up to you, and can be as complicated as you want.  The other great thing about this recipe is for those out there with lactose intolerance, it's ice cream with no cream.

The Ingredients:

2 or 3 heaping tablespoon fulls of Nutella, or 2 or 3 heaping tablespoons of peanut butter, or a generous amount of coaco powder, or half a cup of walnuts... pretty much anything you can think of that would work to flavour ice cream.
5 Bananas

You'll also need a blender.

That's it.

The first part of this recipe is probably the most complicated part.  There are two things that might make this harder than it needs to be.  The first is your bananas, the riper your bananas the better.  If you find yourself with a bunch of bananas that seem to be going bad, but you don't have time to make this recipe, I recommend peeling them, and putting them in the freezer.  Then when you're ready to make your banana ice cream, thaw them out and put them in your blender.  If you're making this with "fresh" ripe bananas simply put them in the blender.  The consistency of your bananas is key for the first part of this recipe.  If your bananas are not ripe enough you'll run into some problems with your blender.  If your bananas aren't that ripe, but you still want to make this ice cream, chop up your bananas and ad them to your blender.  It may take a little while longer to blend them, and you may have to push them down a few times before everything starts to come together.

The second "difficult" part of this recipe is all about what you put in it.  If you love bananas, stop after you've blended the bananas and you're good.  If you want to ad more to the recipe there are several options.  My favorites are peanut butter and Nutella.  Both of these ingredients ad a lot of flavour to the ice cream and blend really well.  If you're worried about sugar, you can simply ad cocoa powder, and that works fairly well.  I've never tried this, but vanilla, berries, or anything soft would probably work as well.  Once you've got the soft ingredients blended to a soupy consistency, you can ad anything for texture, if you'd like.  Crushed walnuts or hazelnuts work, marshmallows might be fun too.  Blend your hard ingredients, but only for a few pulses of your blender.  You could also just mix them around with a spoon or spatula if you'd like as well.

Once your ingredients are all mixed together, take the wonderful banana soup and put it in a freezer friendly container with a lid.  Put the container in your freezer, and in a few hours, depending on how cold your freezer is, you'll have ice cream.  If your freezer is really cold, it may come out very hard (since there's no air injected into it).  If that's the case, simply microwave your ice cream for about 15 to 20 seconds to soften it up.  No matter what you'll taste banana in this ice cream, but with some nice additional ingredients it can be so much more.

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