Scotch-a-roos: The Sequel

I did it! I made a successful batch of Scotch-a-roos! Ya-hoo! The girls in my mom's group will be proud! I've made this recipe several times and have failed (as noted in this post) miserably every time. But this time I finally got it right. What did I do differently? I took the Karo syrup and sugar mixture off the stove long before I thought I should. I took it off as soon as I saw the first little bubble pop up to the surface. And that was the trick! Ya! I love these gooey, chewy yummy little boogers. Mmmm, yum. Now that I've figured out how to make the bars, I'll have to figure out how to spell Scotch-a-roos (as I have seen it spelled many, many different ways). Maybe I'll just call them scotchies. Here is the recipe. I used the recipes from these two websites to make these bars.

1 cup sugar
1 cup Karo syrup

1 1/2 C Peanut Butter
5 1/2 C GF Rice Chex
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup chocolate chips

Warm sugar and Karo syrup in pot on stove until just barely bubbling. Once it comes to a bubble, remove from heat. Add in 1 1/2 cups peanut butter. Then add 5 1/2 cups GF Rice Chex. Stir together and pour into cake pan. Spread out into the pan. Melt butterscotch chips and chocolate chips together in a pot. Pour over the cereal mixture. I would cut these while they're still a little bit warm. Let set before serving.

A few notes:

I measured out 5 1/2 cups of Chex cereal in it's original unchopped size. Then I used my handy mix and chopper (Pampered chef tool) tool to smash the Chex cereal down to a smaller pieces before mixing it with the sugar/Karo/peanut butter mixture. This made for a nice consistency.

I use Hershey's Butterscotch chips as they are gluten friendly. Nestle uses barley to color their butterscotch chips, so they are not gluten friendly. I hear Kroger brand butterscotch chips are gluten friendly as well, but I have not tried them myself.

I used Nestle's chocolate chips.

An 8x8 pan makes pretty thick bars. You might have to double the batch to make a decent sized bar in a 9x13 pan as I think this recipe might be too thin if you try to stretch across a 9x13 pan. I could be wrong though. Maybe I'll have to make these again and find out. ;)

Side note: Here is an interesting article I came across in Sports Illustrated regarding gluten. This is the part that is really fascinating to me....."the digestive juices in your stomach are so corrosive to meat protein that if you dipped your finger in them, it would be down to the bone in 30 seconds—but the same juices can't polish off the gluten in a single crouton. Some parts of gluten have the digestibility of a rock...."