Christmas Crunch
It doesn’t feel like Christmas until you’re overloaded with candy, cookies, and snack mix. Add this option to your holiday repertoire for a sweet and easily adjustable snack mix option. You can easily adjust it to feature different nuts, drizzles, and mix-ins. Imagine this with candied oranges, cranberries, and dark chocolate drizzle. Yum! Maybe peanut butter chip drizzle, pretzels, and chopped-up peanut butter cups? Double yum!
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Christmas Crunch
Description
Stick this out for a munchable snack during holiday board game time!
Ingredients
Scale
- 12 oz box of Crispix-style cereal
- 2 cups dry roasted and salted peanuts
- 2 cups brown sugar
- 1 cup butter
- 1/2 cup corn syrup
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1 cup vanilla/white chocolate chips
- 9.5 ounce bag of m&m’s
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 200º. Line a large sheet pan with parchment paper. Crinkle the paper and then flatten in the pan to keep it from curling up. Set aside. Add cereal and peanuts to a very large bowl and mix. Set aside.
- In a medium sauce pan, add brown sugar, butter, and corn syrup. Cook on medium-high heat while stirring constantly, until soft ball stage (235º to 245º). Shout out to our favorite Thermoworks thermometer for helping us find the perfect stage to remove from heat!
- Remove pan from heat and stir in vanilla and baking soda. The mixture will foam and expand. Immediately add sauce to bowl of cereal and peanuts. Mix with a spoon until well-coated, being careful not to crush cereal.
- Pour mixture onto the prepared sheet pan and spread evenly. Place in oven and bake for 1 hour, stirring mixture about every 15 minutes to spread out sauce and dry out mixture.
- Take pan out of oven and let cool for about an hour. Once cooled, add vanilla/white chocolate chips to a bowl and microwave until melted, about 1 minute. Drizzle melted chips over the cereal mixture. We find it easiest to pour the chocolate into a plastic baggie and snip the end off for drizzling. Let drizzle harden.
- Once drizzle is hard, break mix into pieces and pour into bowl. Mix in M&Ms. Enjoy!
I used this as a base recipe, and it turned out well. I used Chex and drizzled melted semisweet chips & peanut butter – next time I’ll skip the peanut butter; the chocolate was too soft. I mixed in mint M&Ms too. I’ll probably make it again. Thanks!
Sounds fantastic! Thanks for sharing!