Rice Krispies Treats Pumpkin Kit!

Thanks again to everyone who ordered a Dino Drac Halloween Print. I was pleasantly surprised with how well they sold, and from all I’ve heard, people seem to dig them. Still have some left, so if you want in, this is the week!

In other, more pressing news, I made pumpkin-shaped Rice Krispies Treats.

This past month has been a bit of a blur, but if I remember things correctly, I found this at Walmart. The Rice Krispies Treats Pumpkin Kit gives you everything you need to create fourteen edible creatures, right down to a tiny tube of radioactive dye.

The box features Snap, Crackle and Pop in their Halloween costumes. This year, I’m giving the ribbon to Crackle. He looks great as a mummy, and though I doubt he intended this, his hair looks like an amoeba.

Pop comes in last. He’s dressed like a waiter at Applebee’s, and I’ve never forgiven them for the French Onion Soup Incident of ’08.

Don’t ask.

Getting to the good part takes a lot of work. It’s like making Rice Krispies Treats, but with fifty additional messy steps. Oh, the price we pay to be able to squirt cake icing onto pumpkin-shaped cereal blobs.

In correlation with the conveniently numbered photo spread, here’s a breakdown of the prep process:

#1: Gather your supplies. The kit comes with almost everything, but you’ll need butter and cooking spray, too. Or maybe it was margarine? I don’t know, I just grabbed whatever that tub of shit in the fridge was. It probably expired in 2008. The same year as the French Onion Soup Incident. Coincidence?

#2: Melt the marshmallows. That’s where the butter comes in. They mandate three tablespoons, but anyone who has ever made Rice Krispies Treats knows that you need at least six tablespoons to do it right. So yeah, use six. Use seven, for all I care. Just don’t use less than five. If you do, you’ll be scraping fried marshmallow off of that pan until the day I die. (March 27th, 2016. Count on it.)

#3: No, I mean, REALLY melt the marshmallows. You need to liquefy the fuckers. You’re not done until the marshmallows look less like marshmallows and more like the disgusting froth that dangles from the maws of sick dogs. Don’t stop until you can barely stand to look at them.

#4: Dye the goo orange. Yes! I must commend Kellogg’s for including orange dye with the kit. If I had to locate that myself, I would’ve just tried to mix red and yellow together, and never ended up with a proper orange. A guaranteed unhappy ending.

#5: Mush the orange goo into a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal, but wait a second before you do, because that stuff is HOT. I found out the hard way, and my hands hate me now. The goal is to create a big glob of goo/cereal cohesion.

#6: Heh, look at #6. Like a chili pepper wearing a sombrero. I’m trademarking that. In this step, you use the included plastic mold to break your cereal/goo mass down into more manageable, pumpkin-shaped sizes. The mold offers two distinct pumpkin types: Short and fat, and tall and skinny. If you’re wondering about the midpoint mold – the ol’ “average and average” – well, you’re nuts if you thought you were gonna get three mold sizes in a kit that costs less than eight bucks. Get a grip.

Finally, it was time. Time to decorate my pumpkin-shaped Rice Krispies Treats. To help with this, Kellogg’s supplied two tubes of cake icing. One in black, one in green.

As I brought my monsters to life, I was shocked by my level of effort. I was actually trying to make them look right! This wasn’t just another Dino Drac rush job, where I set an egg timer and beat the bitch by forty-five seconds.

I think it was because it took so much work to get to this point. You don’t suffer through 20 minutes of Rice Krispies hell only to dog it on the part that really counts. By then, you’re invested.

These are my treats, and I am so proud of them.

Clockwise, starting with the Dino Drac pumpkin, and ending with the dead thing in the middle:

#1: Dino Drac Pumpkin! It’s my website!

#2: Danger Man Pumpkin! More on him in a minute.

#3: Regular Pumpkin Pumpkin! I must congratulate myself on the decision to outline his pumpkin features with additional green icing. It was my biggest success in a long, long time.

#4: Cool Pumpkin! He wears sunglasses, and has the sort of pockmarks typically associated with no-good punks. Never seen Rice Krispies Treats on motorcycles? Clearly you have not met Cool Pumpkin.

#5: Egyptian Cyclops Monster Pumpkin! This one strikes me as a female. It’s probably the eyelashes.

#6: Dead Pumpkin! Scarred, unconscious and drooling, Dead Pumpkin succumbed to his addictions and paid the ultimate price. In a final slap, somebody will eat his corpse. Probably me.

Now let’s go back to #2 for a second. “Danger Pumpkin.” I feel he has a story to tell. I think you should be the one to tell it. In the comments, please explain Danger Pumpkin to me. Tell me his origin, tell me his vibe. Tell me if he’s friend or foe.

The Rice Krispies Treats Pumpkin Kit works as advertised. If you’ve been thinking about dyeing/shaping Rice Krispies Treats to look like jack o’ lanterns, this is the kit to do it with.