So anyway, I bought this sandcastle mould recently and two boxes of Gluten-free Brown Rice Krispies as well as marshmellows (I'll provide a vegan friendly recipe below for those vegan's who miss Rice Krispy Squares) and for decoration I bought some Glutino straight pretzels to look like sticks, some candy stones I bought at "Sugar Mountain" and those delightfully swirly Belgium Chocolate shells. The rocks are candy coated and had different things on the inside. Some had nuts, some just chocolate, some tasted like a cookie inside and I tasted one that seemed to have a raisin in it. It was nice to have all sorts of flavors! Kinda fun to be surprised!
So I followed the recipe for the original rice krispy squares and made 2 batches to fill up the bucket. I washed the bucket out numerous times and sprayed thoroughly with pam spray but if you're concerned you may try to cover your mould with siran wrap before pressing in the mixture. For those who are vegan (as marshmellows are normally not a vegan friendly treat (it's often made from crushed animal bones (for those who are unaware) to make the gelatin consistency) there are numerous websites devoted to vegan friendly alternatives but here's one of my favorites from Healthiful Pursuit (I would normally go for something peanut butter based but if someone has a nut allergy these ones are way better for them) if you don't have a nut allergy a peanut butter recipe may work great and might even add some extra texture too if you use crunchy. More lumps in the "muddy sand". Anyway, to make the sand around the "cake" I took the left over rice krispies and turned it into dust using the hand-held blender I had on hand. I'm sure you could use all sorts of methods to make this sand but that was mine. I bet smashing them (somewhat carefully) with a mallet would be fun too!
So once all the rice krispie sand and "cake" had finished it was time to decorate. I began forming letters in the sand with the edible sticks, stones and shells like I would if I was playing in the sand at the beach. *BONUS* The nice thing about this project is it's fast, simple, up to your imagination and if you don't like the way your letters are you can play with them and put them in a different spot. Hard to wreck, it's pretty much fool proof.
So I finally took the sandcastle out of the fridge and it only took a few pats for it to come sliding out onto the tray. I also put more "sand" around it and decorated it with more "stones", "shells" and "sticks". I even suggested to the birthday boy that he could keep decorating it if he wanted to when he saw it for the first time but he was too busy taking his own pictures of it for facebook and wanted to dive in to eat it. There were a lot of left over decorations though to do this.
When the birthday boy came in (after going to see a movie with my boyfriend and a few other friends) I trumpeted my celebration noise-maker and he looked very perplexed when I told him that pile of sand on the table was his cake. He wondered how I got this sand in the winter and then he got more excited when he realized it was a giant rice krispy treat. He loved the belgium shells too (who wouldn't?) as I noticed them disappearing off the tray when I looked at the dessert after we dove into it. All in all I think he liked what I made him as he said it was the best birthday celebration he had in a long while. I'm glad I could be a part of it and I'm also happy he liked having a tasty piece of beach.
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