Katie Brown’s Rice Krispies Peanut Butter Cup Pumpkins
The lifestyle expert and author shares an easy-to-make treat that will please every child—and grown-ups, too—this holiday season.
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Hi, my name is Katie Brown, and today I want to share with you how to make a deliciously childlike dessert of Rice Krispie treats, with a peanut butter cup surprise in the middle, shaped like a pumpkin.
That’s right, I know it’s a mouthful, but let’s be honest, a lot of times at these holiday meals, verry sophisticated–pumpkin pie, pecan pie, not really kid-friendly desserts. Well, today I’m going to show you how to make the perfect pumpkin treat that every kid will delight in. Kids want to get excited about dessert, too.
It’s not that tough to make. All you’ve got to do is make some Rice Krispie treats, and that’s pretty easy. You just take a double boiler, melt down your marshmallows with a little bit of butter, then mix in your Rice Krispies, stir it all together till it’s nice and creamy.
While that’s happening, you want to start melting your candy melts and with the candy melts, in order to get it as liquid as you’d like it to be, or very frosting-like, you want to add in some coconut oil or any kind of vegetable oil will work, but I kind of like coconut oil because it adds just a tinge bit of flavor to the treat that I’m making.
Now you can buy candy melts in all kinds of different colors. Obviously, we’re creating pumpkins, so we want orange. I didn’t have orange candy melts, so I took white candy melts, added a little bit of gel food coloring, and if you take a little red and a little yellow, you going to get the orange you want.
Mix that in with your candy melts, stir that up until it gets nice and orange and kind of frosting-like, and in the meantime, take your Rice Krispie mixture off the heat so that it starts to cool. Once it’s cool, then you can take a scoop full of the Rice Krispie treats, put a peanut butter cup–that’s right, a peanut butter cup. As if it’s not exciting enough to get a Rice Krispie treat, this is a Rice Krispie treat with a peanut butter cup in the middle.
So take that peanut butter cup, put it right in the middle of your Rice Krispie treat, fold it around into the shape of a ball or in this case, a shape of a pumpkin. Once that’s done, you’re going to want to pop those on top of a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, put that in your refrigerator. Let it sit for about an hour, an hour and a half until it gets nice and cool. Then take it out, frost it, or roll it around in your orange frosting.
Put that back in the fridge, so it gets nice and hard. It’s almost like you’re making a Rice Krispie cake pop, shaped like a pumpkin. Once it’s been in the fridge and the orange frosting gets nice and hard, pop it out again. And with a little bit of knife, just put a, create a little hole in the top of the pumpkin, where you’re going to put the stem. And then with some pretzels, I kind of break them up a little so that I can get kind of a curvy pumpkin stem-type feel, drive it into the center of your pumpkin. And then with a little bit of a frosting gel, create a couple of leaves. So you have a couple of green leaves on top.
To me, these little Rice Krispie peanut butter cup surprise pumpkins are a great way to make your kids welcome at any fall or Thanksgiving fete. Happy Thanksgiving from my house to yours.