Kamikaze Chews

My quest to make home­made Lit­tle Deb­bie Star Crunch™ start­ed off yes­ter­day. As far as I can tell, Star Crunch is puffed rice, caramel and a choco­late coat­ing. They are gooey and deli­cious. My own for­ay turned out to be pret­ty tasty, but much chewier than gooier. If you’ve ever had a Charleston Chew, then that is the lev­el of chewi­ness we are deal­ing with here. Recipe as fol­lows:

16oz caramels
12oz choco­late morsels
an unknown amount of puffed rice [Rice Krispies]

Melt the caramels in a dou­ble boil­er. That is, boil water in a big pot and put the caramels in a small­er pot with­in the boil­ing water. This will take for-freakin-ever. Once the caramels soft­en, you can mash ’em togeth­er and stir them about to speed up the melt­ing process. They prob­a­bly won’t com­plete­ly liquify, so when you think they are as good as they get dump in some puffed rice and stir it togeth­er. Dump in more puffed rice and stir some more. When you’ve got an even­ly mixed half-rice half-caramel con­coc­tion going, start mak­ing mud pies out of the stuff. It will like­ly be hard­en­ing again so work quick­ly and put the pat­ties on wax paper to cool. If you make them half dol­lar sized you should get a cou­ple dozen. If you make them Adam-sized you’ll get a half dozen.

Now dou­ble boil the choco­late. This will be so much faster than the caramels that you will be amazed, even if you’ve dou­ble boiled choco­late many times. Dip the caramel-rice pat­ties in the choco­late and put ’em back on the wax paper to cool.

A cou­ple hours lat­er they will be ful­ly con­sum­able. They would be amaz­ing­ly awe­some if they weren’t so chewy, so in the future I’m going to make them bite-sized.

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