More After School Special

My last blog post was about my after school experience with my buddy, Ace (not his real name), who bless his heart was game enough to help me make a video, which we agreed to title, The Totsquel.  He was also game enough to make some Rice Krispies Treats for the first time and let me film that too.  Tater Tot Hot Dish and Rice Krispies Treats.  Surely a comfort food fest.

In going back and finally looking through all the video to come up with something to upload to YouTube, I didn't remember we had almost an hours worth of just Rice Krispies Treats video.  I know, huh?  Making the treats is supposed to be easy.  And I guess for that matter it was a lot of fun; just took a little more time than I thought.  I condensed our experience to two videos.

The first video will school you all the way to when the mix is ready to be put in a pan/container.  The second is our experience getting the mix to the container.  Also, in what we had deemed, "The Bjork Experimental Kitchen", we made a second batch which we added some PB to the mix.

I left out footage of our third batch, which did include using some red and green holiday colored marshmallows.  As fun and festive as it sounded to do so, the reality was that when the two colors got melted together it looked more like some sort of brown, disgusting goo.  The only thing that might have been nice to include and I didn't was the use of some chocolate/peppermint bark that we melted in the microwave to frost some of our Rice Krispies Treats' loaves with.

As you may or may not know, chocolate has a very low temperature melting point.  It didn't take much to go from melting-the-bark-to-spread to ruining the bark because we nuked it a bit too long.  This is a great reason why if you have the equipment, using the double boiler method of melting (click here to see a video on how-to) is most likely preferable. 

Of all the different versions we experimented with, even though peanut butter and peppermint don't sound like it would be a tasty combo, my favorite was the peanut butter enhanced Rice Krispies Treats with the chocolate/peppermint bark frosted on top.



Here comes Part 2.



P.S.  We got those cute little loaf pans, which we determined as a perfect gift size (enough to give you more than one serving and yet no so much that you feel like you are going to get sick of it...always leave them wanting more, eh?) at the 99 cent store, which truth be told is actually more specifically the 99.99 cent store now (plus tax).  That said, I was discussing this with Ace the other day and he said in honor of Valentine's Day, this might be a nice little gift for your favorite Valentine.  You get heart shaped pans at the 99.99 cent store.  You make your favorite version of Rice Krispies Treats.  Then you give your Valentine a heart-shaped pan of Rice Krispies Treats you made your self.  That's such a warm feeling, it might just be enough heat to melt some butter.  And I stick by it people (just like they mention in the movie, "Julie and Julia")...just about everything is better with butter.

Isn't Ace a natural on camera?

Thanks, Ace.  This was fun.

P.S.  I'd also like to include a shout out to "The Carpenters" who have been enhancing my Holiday music experience for more years than I care to specifiy here.  Thanks.