Kiley Valentas is a local teacher turned stay-at-home mom with three children. She loves baking, home-making, crafting and creating. When she stopped teaching and her first daughter was a baby, she began baking for friends and family, beginning with simply designed buttercream sugar cookies.
Since then, she says the ideas have grown "into pies, breads, cookies and other sweet treats!" She adds, "My love language is sharing delicious food with those I love, so cooking and baking for them is such a joy to me."
For those too busy to cook (and those just not really that into baking! LOL), each month Kiley offers select goodies for sale online to be picked up from her home bakery in Norman. For October, she loves to bake pumpkin bread, as well as decorate cookies for Halloween parties. November includes pumpkin pie and caramel apple pie, frozen traditional cinnamon rolls and pumpkin pecan cinnamon rolls, and homemade marshmallows and hot cocoa.
Learn more at: Facebook: “Eloise’s Shops”
Instagram: @eloisessweetshop
Email: eloisesshops@gmail.com
Kiley's Brown Butter Pumpkin Spice Crispy Creatures
Ingredients:
2 sticks unsalted butter
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 10-ounce bags of mini marshmallows
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
10 cups crispy rice cereal
Candy melts (green, purple, orange, white, blue…whatever color you want!)
Eyeball sprinkles (small and large)
Any other sprinkles wanted
Directions:
Spray a 9x13" baking dish with nonstick cooking spray, or grease with a stick of butter.
Melt butter in a large stainless steel pan over medium-low heat. Brown the butter by swirling in the pan occasionally. The butter will become foamy, and once that happens, watch closely for small “volcanoes” of light brown to come through the foam. There should be a nutty aroma and small brown bits in the bottom of the pan.
Once you’ve made the brown butter, add the vanilla, marshmallows, salt and pumpkin pie spice to the pan. Remove from heat, and stir constantly until the marshmallows are completely melted.
Add the rice cereal and stir until the cereal is evenly coated. Transfer the mixture into the prepared baking pan, pressing the mixture gently with your utensils, or use the paper the butter was wrapped in to press into an even layer in the pan. Don’t be too aggressive pressing the mixture into the pan. You want to be firm enough to bind the mixture together, but not so firm that you compress it super solidly so you have soft chewy treats and not dense and hard ones.
Allow to cool to room temperature, about 1 hour. Cut into squares, rectangle, or triangles to create your creatures.
Warm candy melts in a small bowl in the microwave according to package directions, or about 30 seconds at a time. Lay out a piece of parchment paper to set the finished crispy creatures on.
Dip your crispy creatures into the melted candy, and the add eyeball sprinkles or any other sprinkles to make your creature. Make it fun and get creative!
Let crispy creatures set up for about 30 minutes, and then enjoy with family and friends!