Name: Healthy Rice Crispy Treats
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 2 h 15 min
Yield: 16
Ingredients: 100g Rice Crispies or certified GF rice puffs. Brown or white. Your call.; 6 heaped tbsp seeds e.g. linseed, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds OR chopped nuts e.g. walnuts, pecans or almonds; 100g Coconut Oil; 50g Cacao powder; 200g Smooth Peanut Butter + extra for drizzling on top; 50ml Maple Syrup or Honey

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Whaaaaaat?! HEALTHY rice crispy treats? Such a thing exists?

Yes, yes my friend. They do. These particular ones involve cacao and peanut butter as well. Kind of like a virtuous homage to a Snickers bar. Read on to find out more.

These delicious rice crispy cakes are a super quick, super tasty treat that you can whip them up in about 10 minutes before sticking them in the fridge.

Yes, they’re even no-bake as well as healthy.

For all the busy mums or – quite frankly – any busy person out there on a mission to go gluten free with a bit of healthiness thrown in for good measure, well, these are the treats for you.

healthy rice crispy treats — Healthy Rice Crispy Treats. A close up.

(Just to say, if you want to be gluten free but a little less than healthy, then have a look at my Best Gluten Free Brownie Recipe. But if you can withstand the temptation of sugar, find out more about these rice crispy treats)

Why are these Rice Crispy Treats healthy?

To begin with, there’s no refined sugar nor dairy in them. A classic British rice crispy cake will often involve lashings of milk chocolate or golden syrup, whilst the American version of this tasty treat will have marshmallows and butter.

Alas! Too much of a good thing i.e. sugar will have my children crawling up the walls (and me with them probably) within moments so I try to limit what sugar-charged indulgences they can have.

But we can’t be boring all the time, can we? So these rice crispy morsels are arguably a more indulgent, richer and grown up type of nibble as they use either maple syrup or honey to sweeten them.

Replace the butter in traditional recipes with coconut oil and peanut butter and you’re already well on the way to creating some sort of superfood from the humble rice crispy.

The peanut butter is rich and filling. It replaces marshmallows to give these rice crispy treats their slight chewiness and this is what also (of course) creates that almost-Snickers flavour.

Meanwhile the coconut oil is a fantastic medium for the cacao to melt away into and add a silkiness to the texture of the chocolatey sauce that you make.

(In fact, a super quick treat is cacao bark: quickly melt some coconut oil with cacao, a splash of maple syrup and a teaspoon of cinnamon. Spread on a lined baking tray and sprinkle with nuts or seeds. Pop in the freezer and enjoy after half an hour or so. It’s like the most morish chocolate ganache ever. But I digress…)

coconut oil healthy — Coconut oil is just marvellous. Particularly with cacao…

What’s so good about cacao?

In this recipe, rather than melting dark chocolate (feel free to do so, by the way. Every recipe is meant to be a source of play and creativity. Enjoy taking something and making it your own.) I’ve gone for cacao powder.

This is another one of those super foods everyone keeps talking about. Raw cacao powder is full of minerals and antioxidants, with good stuff like magnesium and sulphur that improves the body and mood enhancers with long, complicated names that I will not recreate here that improve the mind.

What’s not to like?

Cacao is different from COCOA. It’s a small change in the spelling but important. Cacao and cocoa are both derived from the cacao tree but describe different stages of the process that can ultimately become chocolate.

Cacao is the point after the bean pods have been harvested, their seeds removed and left to dry and quietly ferment in the sun. At that point, the seeds have become cacao nibs (which you can buy and use. I do in my Simple Gluten Free Granola recipe). The dried ones are ground up like coffee beans and … ta daaaa!…you have cacao powder.

raw cacao powder — Raw Cacao Powder. The basis of so much deliciousness.

Now, cocoa happens after the nibs are crushed but then heated to such an extent that this mass separates into cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Chocolate is made from varying proportions of both with added milk and sugar.

So you can see why cocoa is different to cacoa and why, after all that heat treatment, cocoa doesn’t have as much super food goodness in it as cacao.

Not to say that I don’t love cocoa and chocolate. By gum, I do! But any chance I get to smuggle healthy goodness into the members of my family as well as myself, I’ll take it.

Why are these Rice Crispy Treats gluten free?

So, that’s cacao covered. But now to tackle the question of how these treats are gluten free. Well, they involve seeds / nut and rice. Rice in its pure form, be it brown, white, arborio, pudding, sticky is completely gluten free.

Hooray!

HOWEVER… when processed into other things, then rice can get contaminated and gluteny (I know that’s not a word, but you know what I mean). This is so important to be aware of, especially if you’re coeliac.

If you’re not sure what’s hot and what’s not when it comes to gluten, then Sign up for my Gluten vs Gluten Free Checklist below

Back to the rice crispies…

In the case of many cereals, even if they are made from corn or rice, they can contain barley which is not gluten free. Luckily, if a product is designated gluten free AND has barley in it (usually in the guise of barley malt extract for flavour) then it will have less than 20 parts per million of gluten. This, according to Coeliac UK, is find for a gluten free diet. Yay!

So check your labels properly or go for a plain puffed rice that you can find at a health food shop.

And a quick word here about the seeds or nuts that you put in…

healthy omega 3 seed mix — Please don’t eat bird seed. That wouldn’t be good.

… I mean, it’s obvious that they are good for you, right? I don’t need to wax lyrical about them. Just don’t mix up your bird seed with something more wholesome from a reliable, human provider like The Grape Tree.

An Easy & Simple Treat

For all the busy people out there wanting to go gluten free and stay healthy! This is a no bake, no fuss recipe. This really is the recipe for you.

Once you’ve mixed all the ingredients together then it’s a case of spreading it out in a lined baking tray, drizzling with yet more peanut butter and leaving it in the fridge to firm up.

This is the result. These rice crispy treats look indulgent, are kind of indulgent, can go melty, sticky and all over the place if you hold them in your fingers for too long (not that I have experienced this… 🙂 ) and are so good for you.

Enjoy, my friends! Especially you busy ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Rice Crispy treats a healthy snack?

In this instance, yes. You’ve swapped gold syrup for maple syrup. You’ve swapped sugar-charged milk chocolate or cheaper cooking chocolate for coconut oil and cacao. Oh, and don’t forget all the seeds or nuts. These treats are a power house of goodness.

What can I use instead of marshmallow for Rice Krispie treats?

Chocolate (70% cacao solids, minimum and dairy free if that’s your need) or cacao mixed with coconut oil and peanut butter. Sweeten it all up with something like honey or maple syrup. Or just throw caution to the wind and add in a heap of brown sugar. The point is, chocolate is a delicious alternative to marshmallow!

Why are my rice crispy cakes chewy?

Ah! You’ve left these particular rice crispy cakes too long in the fridge. These treats are best eaten within a couple of days as they will go soggy. Not chewy, soggy. Alas, unlike much of the other recipes on this website, such as my Best GF Chocolate Brownies, these Rice Crispy treats cannot be frozen. So eat up and enjoy them fresh!

16 large slices or 32 small