October 12, 2006:
You know those seasonal recipe magazines supermarkets always stuff near the cashiers? My mother used to buy tons of those, and rarely threw them away. Every year, they'd be back on the kitchen table, pulled from a cabinet way up high and totally forgotten until a situation called for chicken nuggets shaped like Christmas bells or cupcakes with witch faces. Through some stroke of luck, I inherited these magazines when I moved out. Keeping with the tradition, they sit stacked in a closet, untouched and never thought about until the woman or I decide to celebrate the holidays by cooking food shaped like the holidays. It was in this pile of 10-25 year old magazines that I found the key to making Rice Krispies Treats that look like jack o' lanterns.
An advertisement for then-new Marshmallow Rice Krispies (think this was 1983, but I could be wrong and I don't feel like checking) doubled as a recipe for "Jack-O'-Lantern Treats," which aside from forcing me to hyphenate "jack o' lantern" for the remainder of this article, just seemed like the cutest little snacky motherfuckers on paper. I've spent many years staring at this ad and wanting to make its insinuations a reality, and I guess that's what I like most about doing this site: Justification in living stupid.
Grab your pen, grab your paper and get ready to learn how to turn cereal and a bunch of other shit into something suitable only for 2nd grade classroom Halloween parties. Hopefully you're six-years-old and not a dropout.
They don't make Marshmallow Krispies anymore, and they certainly don't make Fruity Marshmallow Krispies anymore, because the world just wasn't prepared for an ad jingle that unbelievably joyous. Though multicolored gooey marshmallow speckles would add something to the finished product, they aren't necessary. You can just use a box of regular Rice Krispies. You'll also need cake icing, cake gel, marshmallows, butter, and various ornamental candies of your choice. Gotta be honest: We didn't have any of this stuff in the house, and it wasn't cheap to go out and buy it all. For the money spent, we could've invited half of you to a catered event hall for a big party with special musical guest Boris Pickett.
What I'm getting at is...you should really think about how much jack-o'-lantern Rice Krispies Treats mean to you before making it your personal mission to have them. This isn't like tying a crumpled up tissue inside another tissue and calling it a ghost. This takes cash.
I'm going to give you the loosest directions on how to make the core Rice Krispies Treats ever, because 99% of you already know what to do, and the 1% who do not only need to know this: It's not an exact science. Everyone makes Rice Krispies Treats a little differently, and yet, they all seem to come out just the same. Unless you pile on five times the amount of required butter. Then they're better.
You start by melting a few tablespoons of butter in a pan, which both gets things nice and greasy, and makes the completed dish taste like more than just cereal and marshmallows mashed together. After the butter melts, throw in the marshmallows. Use about four cups. You can use big or small marshmallows; there's ultimately no difference, but I find it more fun to pour a few hundred marshmallows than a few dozen. When I do it, I yell "AVALANCHE" and pretend the melted butter is a stranded snowboarder.
Lower the heat a bit, and stir the marshmallows constantly. Don't let them sit. If you do, they'll burn, or at least get hard and unattractive. It's kind of annoying to stand by the stove waving a spoon around a pan over and over again, but you'll only have to do it for a few minutes. To keep yourself entertained while stirring, I recommend using your free hand to create shadow puppets on a nearby wall. Try making Abe Lincoln like #276 did in Gremlins 2. Send pics if you do.
When the marshmallow/butter combo looks like pancake mix, it's time to add the Rice Krispies. Lots of it. Like a half a box or something. Remove the pan from heat before you do, because Rice Krispies fear heat. Stir everything until it looks like a big gloppy mass of slimy Rice Krispies, and you're almost ready to move onto the fun stuff.
The recipe on the advertisement didn't mention this, but after stirring and getting the cereal landmass into a safer container, you've gotta let it sit for a good long while before shaping it into pumpkins. It's too sticky, too fluid and too rebellious to work with you if you try too fast. We actually left it in the fridge for hours before doing the pumpkin prance, and it helped big time. Sadly, this direction is mandatory. If you think you can get away with skipping this step, I'll be the one who laughs when you run up to me with steaming makeshift gloves of Rice Krispies TreatMeat that won't come off your hands.
There isn't any real trick to forming the jack-o'-lanterns. You just...do it. Start by rolling a baseball sized-and-shaped glob of Rice Krispies TreatMeat, add a stem, and you're done. You'll have enough for six pumpkins if you follow the recipe above. The reason you only see five is because nobody can make Rice Krispies Treats and not grab handfuls from the pan as soon as it's done. Tradition, see. It's like going to Grandma's house for pasta and knowing that the bitch had her filthy old fingernails digging through the sauce for hours before you arrived.
While the snacks do manage to look something like pumpkins even without any clothes on, it's the trimmings that will truly transform them into total terrors tor tou to teat. Once the Jack-O'-Lantern Treats have cooled and hardened enough to allow for decoration, break out all of those other random ingredients I listed earlier, and put your artsy glasses on even if everyone knows they're not prescription and that you're an asshole wearing purely cosmetic glasses.
There is better equipment to do what I'm doing in the picture above, but I didn't have it. If you have whatever those things that neatly press out cake icing are called, use them. If you don't, make the best with what God gave you. God at least gave me orange cake icing, and that alone is enough to turn a ball-shaped Rice Krispies Treat into the Great Pumpkin, who while never seen by human eyes must surely be shaped like a pumpkin.
Aside from cake icing and gel, you can use all sorts of candies to create the eyes, mouth or whatever other face parts you can dream up. Though the treats are meant to be pumpkins, there's nothing keeping you from making them pumpkins with an identity crisis; the shape works just as well to forge demonic faces like the guy on the left, who with the help of my dirty thumb even has a fully formed mouth with chocolate chip teeth. And a candy corn nose!
The treat shown on the right is a little more traditional, because if you're going to go through all of this trouble, at least one of the pumpkins should be decorated like a pumpkin. Conformist inclinations might not be an ideal in everyday life, but it's okay to spread a little of it into projects involving Rice Krispies Treats.
They're great little canvases, and it's a lot easier to paint Jason Voorhees in cake gel onto a Rice Krispies Treat than to make a Rice Krispies Treat that's actually shaped like him. The icing and add-ons do a lot for the taste -- they're as close to cake as something this crunchy can get, and with the amount of gunk that'll get all over your face when you try to eat one, there's no way you won't feel like a little kid. I assume that if you're willing to go through the necessary steps to create Rice Krispies Jack-O'-Lantern Treats, feeling like a little kid was kind of the point.
