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.