Ultimate Rice Krispie Treats

Inspired by Smitten Kitchen's Salted Brown Butter Crispy Treats, I whipped up a batch of the classic snack last night.  I cannot even tell you the last time I made Rice Krispie Treats, but it can't have been in the last five years.  I think I imagine them as the too hard, sickly sweet gigantic hunk o'krispie that you get in coffee shops and bakeries and I cringe.  Salted brown butter RKTs are a different animal entirely, but every bit as mind blowingly simple.

 Why yes, I did open up the Ziploc bag to take this photo after I had packaged them up.

I used:
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/2 stick salted butter
1 10 oz bag of jumbo marshmallows
6 cups of crispy rice cereal (I admit - I used store brand - sorry Kellogg's)
Butter flavored Pam
a large pan (baking, cake, Pyrex, heck a jellyroll pan will work, you'll just have thinner treats)

Melt the butter over medium heat and allow to brown slightly.  In the meantime, spray your pan with Pam.
Turn off the heat and add in the marshmallows.  Stir to combine as the marshmallows melt.  If you need to turn the heat back on to low you can do so, but for heaven's sake, don't walk away!
Once the marshmallows are melted, dump in the cereal and stir to combine.  Scrape into your Pammed pan and flatten out.  I get my hand a little bit wet with water to prevent too much sticking and smoosh the top of my treats down flat.  Now, I'll be honest, with this much butter, things are already less sticky and a hair more greasy than normal, but whatever.

I thought about topping my treats with a sprinkling of French sea salt (yeah, that's how I roll), but opted instead to leave one batch plain, and to top the other with butterscotch and chocolate chips.  I thought kids might balk at the salt and these are for a children's hospital fundraiser and I thought there was a decent chance kids might be eating them.

Next time around since we weren't wild about the overly sweet butterscotch chips, we're thinking peanut butter and chocolate.  Luckily, SK already thought of that as well.  I think I'll stick to the RKT recipe and then add a thin layer of the peanut butter and chocolate toppings rather than much with all that corn syrup though.