I’m not partial to any one type of cookie; I love ’em all (just check out my archive of cookies and bar recipes for evidence!). I love making them and sharing those little morsels of deliciousness around. Whoever invented cookies had the right idea in mind – lots of love and joy packed into bite-sized treats; it should be cookie and candy season all year round in my opinion, not just during the holidays.
No bake rice krispie cookies
These No Bake Rice Krispie Cookies are right up there with the best of them! They are made with rice krispies so they are simple and no bake (just like these Mars bar slices and these brown butter rice krispie treats), but they also pack all the indulgent flavor of pecan pie! While these rice krispie cookies are incredibly easy to make, they do need some (adult) supervision. You’ll be making piping hot butterscotch sauce which is that rich, decadent, delicious filling that everyone loves in pecan pies (and pecan pie bars!), and it’ll also be the base for these cookies. So to make sure you get perfect results every time, I highly recommend that you use a sugar thermometer. A thermometer takes out all the guesswork and lets you know when everything’s perfect (a little too aggressively if you ask me, with that loud and annoying beep!).
A sugar thermometer is your friend!
The thermometer that I use for most everything I do is the one linked here. I absolutely love it and it has lasted me a long time with A LOT of use. Another great and affordable thermometer if you don’t plan on using one regularly is this one right here – I used something similar to this for years, just as a candy thermometer. Besides, a thermometer can be used not just for cooking candy like we are doing here, but also as a meat thermometer too (to ensure perfectly cooked meat with an optimal internal temp.), so it really is a small but very useful investment. Along with a kitchen scale as well (cups and spoons are just not your friends when it comes to baking, as I talk about in my measurement conversions chart for recipes). The butterscotch sauce here is heated to a very hot 240°F and mixed with pecans. Once it cools down to a still very hot 180°F, the rice krispies are added and mixed, and then portioned and rolled into balls. Mixing in the rice krispies will cool down the mixture more so that you can handle the mix without any issues, but you still have to work quickly to roll the mix into balls before the butterscotch sauce hardens into a toffee.
How to make these rice krispie cookies dairy free and vegan
Another great thing about these no bake rice krispie cookies is that this recipe is dairy-free friendly and also vegan friendly. Simply use coconut cream instead of whipping cream, and use dairy free chocolate to dip them in so that they are both dairy-free and vegan. These cookies are some of my Thanksgiving favorites, along with this butter pecan cake, crustless pumpkin pie, and pumpkin roll cake that I make almost every year! Plus these no bake rice krispie cookies make excellent gifts for the holiday season too.
