Turning the Butter and Marshmallow Up to Eleven: Brown Butter-Peanut Rice Crispy Treats

Not surprisingly, I made cereal treats while my oven was broken. I never get tired of Rice Krispies treats -- in all their delightful variations -- and one of the first things I made after the oven broke were the amazing Peanut Butter Crispy Bars from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking. But as the weeks without an oven dragged on, I decided to try Joanne Chang's "Brown Butter-Peanut Rice Crispy Treats" from Pastry Love. They are cereal treats with salted peanuts, topped with a chocolate-peanut butter ganache. 

To make the cereal layer, you brown a mixture of unsalted butter and vanilla seeds; add marshmallows and salt; cook until the marshmallows melt; and mix in Rice Krispies and roasted, salted peanuts. You pat the mixture into a parchment-lined pan and let the treats cool to room temperature. After the treats are cool, you spread on a ganache made from bittersweet chocolate, creamy peanut butter, and salt.
While the recipe says that you should store the treats at room temperature, it was hot when I made these and I put them in the fridge because I wanted to make sure that the ganache was firm when I sliced them. The cold temperature caused the ganache to look grainy; in the photo above, you can see that it looks speckled. Fortunately, this was just a cosmetic defect and the ganache was still smooth and delicious.
 
These treats were insanely good. As you can see in the photo, there was so much marshmallow-browned butter binder that the treats were almost solid (although still chewy). I loved the addition of the salted peanuts in the treats, which added some nice texture and saltiness to offset their sweetness and richness. Likewise, I think the bittersweet and astringent ganache played an important role in delivering a well-balanced, decadent treat.

This recipe requires two 10-ounce bags of marshmallows, which is a lot. It got me thinking about the ratios of cereal to butter to marshmallows in various cereal treat recipes that I've made. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and it turns out that this recipe definitely has both the most butter and the most marshmallow relative to the weight of the cereal.
 
Weight ratios of cereal : butter : marshmallow
  • Traditional Rice Krispies Treats (the recipe on the cereal box) — 1 : 0.26 : 1.75
  • Edd Kimber's Sweet and Salty Rice Crispy Treats — 1 : 0.85 : 2.0
  • Shauna Sever's Next Level Crispy Treats — 1 : 0.44 : 2.2 (although these also have white chocolate, equal to the weight of the butter, included in the binding mixture)
  • This recipe — 1 : 1.4 : 3.5
All of that sweet, stretchy marshmallow and rich browned butter make these treats super indulgent (and that's not even considering the impact of the ganache!) -- but they're worth the splurge. I'm sure there is an upper limit of how much butter and marshmallow you can add to a Rice Krispies treat, and I suspect this recipe is somewhere close to that line. I'm here for as much butter and marshmallow as a cereal treat can take!
 
Recipe: "Brown Butter-Peanut Rice Crispy Treats" from Pastry Love by Joanne Chang. 

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