Rice Crispy Treats (vegan & gluten-free)

You can melt together vegan butter and vegan marshmallows, transfer them to a bowl and slowly add rice cereal and you will get amazing rice crispy treats. You can't mess up this recipe...you can't. I measured everything out for you because...that's what a recipe is but when I doubled the batch, I didn't measure the second round of ingredients so make these as sloppy or as by-the-book (or blog post!) as you wish. I also give you some cool flavors to add so read on!

I bought all of these ingredients at Trader Joe's because I knew they have all the ingredients vegan. Trader Joe's sells rice cereal that is organic and has all vegan ingredients-I believe they are also GF but check first before buying if you are strict GF. I am not gluten-free so I don't look for that label unless I'm making it a point to make the recipe gluten-free for someone else. Earth Balance is my favorite, and most readily available, dairy-free butter and Trader Joe's only sells vegan marshmallows (but double check the ingredients. Gelatin is not vegan so if you see that as an ingredients, the mallows are not vegan).

This recipe is best made with mini mallows because they may be a little easier to melt but I used the jumbo mallows and it was just fine! You will need to melt and mix just a little longer since they are bigger. This recipe requires no baking (just setting in the fridge) but you absolutely do not have to wait for the treats to set. I taste-tested quite a bit as I was making these 😃 Also, these treats were devoured within hours by my niece and I (ok, mostly me). Rice crispy treats were never my favorite childhood treat. I can't say I ever craved them or that my mom even made them alot but for some reason over the holiday, I wanted to melt some marshmallows.

By the way, I think spelling krispys actually comes from the cereal, Rice Krispys, and I didn't use that cereal so I changed the way I spelled crispy. Let's get on with this recipe because it's soooo simple, you can whip it up when you're even running late. Melt, stir, pour, mix, set. That's pretty much it.

1/2 cup of vegan butter
1 (10oz) pack of vegan marshmallows
5 cups of rice cereal

Melt 1/4 cup of butter and 1/2 the marshmallows in a medium bowl. Mix well until it ends up a gloppy mess. The marshmallows won't mix completely with the butter but it all mixes well with the cereal. Transfer the melted butter and marshmallows to a glass dish and add 2 cups of the cereal. Mix well by hand. The mixture will look like rice cripsy treat mix. Melt the rest of the butter and marshmallows, transfer to the bowl and and mix in the rest of the rice cereal. Mix all the batter together until the marshmallows are evenly distributed throughout the mixture then gently press the mixture into a square glass dish. I put the dish in the fridge and let set for an hour but you don't need to refrigerate. Cut into small pieces and serve.

Flavoring: top the crispys with melted dark chocolate, add chocolate chips to the batter, add vanilla extract to the butter and marshmallow mix before adding the cereal or add some peppermint extract to the butter and mallow mix. For the holidays, you can also crush up candy canes and add the pieces to the batter.

There is no way to make these low calorie, low sugar so I'm not going to try-they are what they are so treat yourself! You can use any vegan butter, mallows or rice cereal you wish. You don't need that much cereal so if you don't use all the 5 cups of cereal that's fine. I hope you love these!

My niece was my hand model for some of these pics and she helped me taste test the treats. She gives them 5 stars 😄