Pumpkin Rice Krispie Treats

Pumpkin rice crispy treats are perfect treat for Halloween, Thanksgiving, or really anytime around the fall or autumn. These decorated and festive treats are easy to make and are perfect either as a special dessert or even a kid's food craft.

How to Make Pumpkin Rice Krispie Treats

Making Pumpkin Rice Krispie Treats is really easy. They are simple 4 ingredient treats plus a few items you'll use for decorating. All you need to do is know how to make Cookie Cutter Rice Krispie Treats and Colored Rice Krispie Treats.

These no bake dessert treats can be whipped up and ready to go in about 20 minutes, possibly a smidge longer if you take a while decorating them. They work well if you want a fun food craft for your kids to try or as a centerpiece on a fall themed dessert table.

Variations

These are decorated treats, like Dinosaur, Unicorn, or Baby Shark Rice Krispie Treats. One fun thing about them is that you can customize them to be however you want them to be. Here are a few other decorating ideas:

• Ball them up: instead of using a cookie cutter, you can create rice krispie balls and then decorate them from three.
• Add a pretzel stem: Break off a chunky pretzel and put that on top as the steam instead of green sprinkles.
• Add a reeses cup stem use an upside down reeses cup as the stem instead of sprinkles.
• Dip them in candy melts: instead of using orange food coloring, use orange candy melts and then dip your treats in those for the color.
• Flavor them: make them pumpkin flavored by adding a few tbs of pumpkin or some pumpkin pie filling to the mixture.
• Use Chocolate: you can use melted chocolate or chocolate icing in a piping bag to decorate the face of the pumpkin instead of black decorating gel.

Supplies

• spatula
• large stock pot or Microwave Safe Bowl
• Measuring Cup
• 8X8 baking pan

Ingredients

• 3 Cups Rice Krispies Cereal
• 8 oz of Jet Puff Marshmallows
• 2 Tbs Salted Butter
• (optional) non-stick canola oil spray
• Food Coloring
• Sprinkles
• Decorative Icing

Instructions

Gather up all of your ingredients and supplies so that everything is together and ready to use. Then you will need to get your supplies pre-greased.

For greasing, you can use a pad of butter or you can use some non-stick cooking spray. The cooking spray tends to be a faster, easier and more consistent coating. However, the butter tends to taste a little better.

Note: the ingredients listed are for a half batch of these. If you want to make more, just double the ingredient amounts and use a 9X13 pan.

Step One

We start this recipe by adding some butter into a pot. Turn your stovetop heat to low and let the butter melt.

Once your butter has mostly melted, you can add in 8 ounces of Marshmallows. Use a spatula to stir the marshmallows into the butter until everything is completely melted.

If you want to do this part a little bit faster, you can follow the steps in our microwave Rice Krispies Treats recipe.

• Put the butter and marshmallows together in a microwave safe bowl.
• Put your bowl in the microwave and heat for 30 seconds. (can go up to 60 seconds if doing a full batch.)
• Take the bowl out and stir well.
• Continue heating for 30 seconds at a time and stirring between until marshmallows are melted.

Step Two

Take out your orange food coloring and add it to the melted marshmallow and butter mix. Again, using your spatula, stir everything until it is a bright orange color. Feel free to add as much food coloring as you need.

Note: if you don't have orange food coloring, you can use red and yellow to make the orange.

Step Three

Once your marshmallow mix is the color you want it to be, pull out your Rice Krispies cereal.

Dump 3 measured cups of Rice Krispies into the Orange Marshmallow Mix. Stir this together with your spatula until everything is combined.

You may need to add more food coloring to the Rice Krispies cereal to get them to the color you desire as adding in the cereal can sometimes mute or yellow the color a little.

Step Four

Empty the contents of your large stock pot into the bottom of the baking pan. Use the spatula and smash the mixture until it is completely flat inside the pan.

Now set your treats to the side for about 20 to 30 minutes and allow them to cool. You can put them in the refrigerator or freezer to speed up the cooling process if you like.

Step Five

Once everything has cooled, you can pull out your pan and your pumpkin shaped cookie cutter. 

Place your cookie cutter where you would like to make a pumpkin shape and firmly press down into the Rice Krispie Treats. You may need a knife to cut around the edges of the cookie cutter. Sometimes the Rice Krispie Treats are thicker than the cookie cutter.

Once you have cut out all your pumpkins, set them to the side.

Pro tip: Since the Rice Krispie Treats are so sticky, you can take some of the excess stuff that's not part of the pumpkin shape, smush it together, and sometimes get another pumpkin shape out of them.

Step Six

Now it's time to decorate!

Decorating your pumpkin shape is pretty easy. All you really need to do is take your green icing and play put it on the cut out stem. You can put a small strip at the bottom of the stem to make it connect to the pumpkin if you like. Do this for all of your pumpkin shapes until you're done.

If you are making these for Halloween, you can now take out your black decorative writing gel and make Jack-o-lantern faces on each of your pumpkins. Remember, the most important thing is to get creative and have fun.

That's all there is to this easy Pumpkin Rice Krispie Treats recipe!