Party Dessert: Star Krispies

My state worker family stayed home today for our second holiday of the month. (we have one more, too!) Having bought two bags of marshmallows on sale at Foodland last week, I decided to test an idea I had for the kids’ Christmas parties this year.

Anyone out there who is a toddler mom living on a budget knows what I’m talking about when I refer to the horror of the goodie bag. I thought it was bad when my two kids went to a sitter with 5 other kids, but then the two of them entered preschool and my horror was magnefied tenfold.

Valentine’s Day.

Easter.

Halloween.

Christmas.

End of the Year.

Birthday.

It just never ends. Buddy has around a dozen classmates. Baby Girl has over 20. It’s not like the teachers or parents expect anything, my KIDS do. I sometimes go cheap by making a party food, but times like Halloween are a bit hard to avoid. It’s why I wasn’t around for most of the end of October.

Anyway, the idea came to me last week that maybe I could make Rice Krispies treats made into cute shapes using my onigiri molds! I have several sizes of lots of different shapes, but eventually settled upon stars. This worked out pretty well since stars fit with a Christmas theme, making it a good candidate for party food.

I tried the flower, but it wasn’t very apparent that it was a flower. I ate them. Yum. I dug out my “non-pareils” or in normal terms, “sprinkos.” The underside of the stars are a bit crushed, since I had to press down pretty hard to get them to take the shape.

I put them onto my food dehydrator racks to cool. One thing I did learn quickly was that you have to work fast. When you make these in a pan and wait for them to cool so you can cut them, they seem to take forever to cool. When you’re making each one into a little star, the pot cools super fast since time is actually flying by. Another tip, don’t let them touch when they’re cooling. I thought I’d shove them all onto one tray, but when I was bagging them, they were attached with marshmallows.

I ended up with 37 of these total from one standard side-of-the-box recipe of Rice Krispies. This includes the two flowers I ate. As you can see, I ran out of Christmas sprinkles and had to bust out my Halloween ones. Even with 35, this is more than enough to cover each kid in my nightmarish sea of toddler classmates. The treats themselves aren’t really big, which is good junk-food-consumption-wise. Let’s not forget, one batch of Rice Krispies treats (about 7 dollars) is pretty dang cheap compared to the usual 60-75 bucks I spend on Goodie Bags from Hell.

Pretty good use of an onigiri mold too, huh? 😀 Yes, I am pleased with myself.