Brown Butter M&M Rice Krispie Treats

These M&M Rice Krispie Treats are a super easy nostalgic treat that’s perfect for lunch boxes, bake sales, or your holiday cookie tray. With just 6 ingredients and about 15 minutes of effort, it’s so easy to get that chewy, gooey comfort.

So read on for all the detailed tips and tricks to making brown butter rice krispie treats with M&Ms. Or just grab your holiday M&Ms, hit that Jump to Recipe button, and let’s make some homemade rice krispie squares!

Ingredients

These browned butter rice krispie treats include the classic Rice Krispie treat ingredients: butter, the rice cereal, and marshmallows. This version adds vanilla for flavor and M&Ms for color and crunch.

Browned butter adds a rich, nutty flavor to the rice krispie bars. I’ll always take the extra minutes to brown butter for that flavor, whether it’s for a pasta sauce, my double butterscotch chocolate chip cookies, or cherry blondies.

I personally have found that regular sized marshmallows melt more evenly than mini marshmallows for making these rice cereal bars. But I know that others recommend the mini marshmallows.

Like I discovered when making candy bar cookies, the M&Ms in M&M cookies are quite heat resistant. This makes them great to add to the warm butter, marshmallow, and rice cereal mixture.

Variations and substitutions

• Go with red and green M&Ms for Christmas Rice Krispie treats, or change up the colors or difference holiday Rice Krispie treats.
• Mix in a half cup of mini marshmallows with the M&Ms.
• Sub in a cup of homemade rainbow sprinkles!

Recipe tips and tricks

There’s not a lot of variation in the method for making rice krispie squares, whether it’s for my peanut butter rice krispie treats or these M&M rice krispie treats.

For a recipe that has so few ingredients and takes only about 10 minutes, I took a lot of process shots. Here are the four in the making of these brown butter M&M rice krispie squares that I think would be helpful.

Brown the butter carefully: Melt the butter over medium-low heat, swirling occasionally. Once it turns golden brown and smells nutty, remove the pan from the heat.

Add the marshmallows to the browned butter, then return the pan to low heat, stirring until the marshmallows are nearly completely melted. Remove the pan from the heat and add the vanilla and salt.

Working relatively quickly, add the rice cereal to the pot. It does not have to be completely uniform at this point.

Add the M&Ms and press the mixture into the pan with your spatula. Cover with plastic wrap and let your M&M rice krispie treats cool completely.

You can cut your browned butter rice krispie bars in the pan, or turn the whole batch out onto a cutting board and cut into squares. Store at room temperature for up to one week.

Recipe FAQs

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