Puppy Chow

I grew up in the 1980s and the 1990s. It was a time of microwaves and convenient health foods. And Bartle & James. Remember those commercials? Whatever happened to those guys? Hmm.
It was also a time of American Gladiators and with all the talk of the new series this week, it got me thinking about those days of growing up. Now, when I was growing up, my mom was a bit of a health food junkie. We didn't eat a lot of processed foods (except the occasional bag of wedding cookies), if we wanted something sweet... she'd make us some Grandma Cookies. We also didn't have any types of sugary cereal. Only cornflakes or regular cheerios for us. She always added brown sugar to it for us, but no fruit loops or cocoa puffs. To this day, I've never had captain crunch or lucky charms.

Anyway, I think I seem to remember having chex cereal a few times, but we never made puppy chow or muddy buddies or whatever you want to call it with it. No, I only had puppy chow when I went to slumber parties. I never really even knew what it was or how to make it. I just knew that it was covered in powdered sugar (my favorite) and that it was crunchy and chocolatey. In other words, Heaven in a Bag.

Recently, I bought some chex cereal after seeing a recipe on tv for making faux fried chicken with chex cereal. You can read about the chicken here. So, since I have a huge box of chex lying around and with the nostalgia that American Gladiators brought back... I decided to finally give these a try.

I didn't make a full batch. I actually just kind of eyeballed everything. I melted some hershey chocolate bars with a spoonful of peanut butter and some butter in the microwave, poured it over some chex cereal and then shook it in a bag with the powdered sugar. I let it harden on a piece of parchment paper and then this morning, I decided to shake it with some more powdered sugar (have I mentioned how much I love powdered sugar?). It is just how I remembered. So sweet and crunchy. The perfect pop in your mouth snack.

Chex Puppy Chow

Before the second coating of powdered sugar.