Homemade Gluten Free “Nestle Crunch” Candy Bars

Rice Dream Crunch Bar

Homemade Crunch Bar

I got the idea for this the day I was working on my GF Rice Crispies post and dipping my Buckeyes in chocolate at the same time. A light bulb went off… I wonder how it would work out to make my own GF “Nestle Crunch” candy bar with chocolate and the Erewhon Crispy Brown Rice cereal?? All I needed was a candy bar mold to find out!

I have been collecting chocolate molds for a few years now, ever since Sam was about 2 and he had a little playmate with Eosinophilic Esophagitis. This boy had a very limited range of foods that he could eat, (as in, you could count them on 2 hands!). He had a feeding tube and his diet was supplemented with EleCare Formula through his tube. My heart really hurt for him, especially during holiday playgroups when special treats were present. This little boy could not have dairy but his mom would carry around a bag of Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips to give him as a treat. I presume they are safe for those on the dairy free diet plan because this mother was very thorough in researching foods that she gave her son. But as always, double check for yourself to be sure they meet your specific needs, a lactose intolerance is very different from a dairy allergy. There are specialty brands of Gluten-Free Dairy-Free chocolate chips but they can be harder to come by and can cost more too. A few websites to look at: Chocolate Emporium, Amanda’s Own Confections, Sunspire, and Enjoy Life. I mention this story about EE (Eosinophilic Esophagitis) for two reasons: one as a way to bring up why I started making chocolate treats but also because there is an apparent association between EE and celiac disease. I found this study on CSA’s website (they are great resource for ongoing studies related to celiac disease. They post the PubMed PMID number for the various studies so if you find one of interest, you can Google that number to read the study.) If you have a child with CD and they are not healing on the GF diet, this might be something you may want to mention to your doctor.

Spectrum Brand Shortening was also okay for him so I got the idea to buy various sucker molds, melt down the chocolate and pour them into the molds to make chocolate suckers. This way he could have his safe chocolate chips in a different shape and have a special treat of his own too. Click on this link for Candy making instructions when using chocolate chips.

For the candy bar that I made, I used Chocoley’s Bada Bing Bada Boom Candy Melts since that was what I had already made for my Buckeye Candy. If you can tolerate dairy, it is an excellent product and it happens to be “celiac-safe!”

There really isn’t a recipe for this, just a method:

I put my candy bar mold in the freezer for a few minutes. This helps the chocolate set and makes the finished product easier to pop out of the mold.

I placed a thin layer of melted chocolate in the mold then sprinkled Erewhon's Crispy Brown Rice Cereal on top of the first chocolate layer.

I then added a second layer of chocolate on top of the cereal. I need to practice on my chocolate pouring skills! 😉

I placed the filled candy bar molds in the refrigerator for a few minutes until the chocolate hardened.

This experiment was a great success (taste-wise anyway… now I need to work on the appearance, LOL!) Outside of the fact that the mold I used was probably twice the thickness of a Nestle Crunch candy bar (which if I am remembering correctly were/are pretty thin), we thought the taste was VERY CLOSE to Nestle’s version, just with a lot more chocolate. I decided to break the bars up into smaller pieces since a whole bar would be chocolate overload. I have been storing the pieces in an airtight container so we can just grab a small piece to satisfy our sweet tooth as needed.

The airtight container you see here was a bonus find on my trip to The Dollar Tree a few weeks ago to buy holiday gift containers. They are very similar to the Snapware containers that often retail for $5.99 each, but only cost a buck! 😀