By Claire Burnett, The Current Co-Editor-in-Chief
As November begins, the holiday season is fast approaching, along with holiday treats, decorations, and festivities. As I was perusing through holiday recipes to make as gifts this year, I stumbled upon a holiday version of a popular Chex dessert: muddy buddies. Using the recipe from A Gouda Life, I tried out this delicious treat, also called puppy chow, reindeer chow, and muddy munch.
The recipe was fairly simple to make and definitely suitable for new bakers who don’t want a recipe that takes a long time or creates many dishes. I started by measuring out a hefty amount of rice Chex, but any kind of Chex cereal would work. Depending on your desired taste, you could swap out the rice Chex for chocolate, blueberry, or maple flavors.
In a pan on low heat, I melted together chocolate chips, unsalted butter, and peanut butter. This part is relatively easy, but it is important that you only cook the chocolate mixture until it is fully melted and mixed together. Otherwise, overmixing or overcooking could cause the mixture to become thick and difficult to spread on the Chex cereal.
After all of the ingredients were melted and incorporated into one delicious sauce, I removed the pan from heat and stirred in some vanilla extract. I then poured the mixture over the Chex cereal, carefully stirring it in. This part was arguably the most tedious because you need to make sure that you aren’t breaking the cereal as you mix in the chocolate. I will admit as I was first mixing, I heard a few frightening crunches, but this is almost inevitable. A few broken cereal pieces won’t ruin the recipe, but it’s crucial that most of the cereal isn’t broken.
Once the chocolate fully coats each Chex piece, I poured the cereal into two separate bags, each with the same amount of powdered sugar. The next step is absolutely critical: make sure that your bags are fully sealed before shaking the cereal. Otherwise, the powdered sugar will explode and create an unpleasant mess to clean up. As long as the bag is sealed, shaking the cereal was the most enjoyable part of the process for me.
After aggressively shaking the bag, you will start to see the muddy buddies fully come together. My only issue was that some of the chocolate-covered Chex clumped together, resulting in snowball-like clumps of muddy buddies. Next time, I would probably use a little bit less Chex to make sure that each piece can be fully coated in chocolate, which would prevent some of these clumps.
The last step in the recipe is to mix in red and green M&M’s for a festive flare, but what I love about this recipe is that it is customizable to your taste. In place of M&M’s, you could add pretzels, marshmallows, peanut butter cups, peanuts, or any combination of these.
Overall, this recipe was delicious and simple to make. It has the classic taste of chocolate and peanut butter, with a crispy crunch from the Chex cereal. This would be a great treat to make as holiday gifts for relatives, neighbors, friends, and anyone else.