This One Ingredient Will Elevate Your Rice Krispies Treats

Rice Krispies Treats are an easy-to-execute, adaptable dessert: You can go the traditional route, or change it up with different cereals, use potato chips, or elevate it with browned butter. As good as Rice Krispies Treats are in their many forms, though, they do have the tendency to get a little stiff and dry, especially after a day or so. But counteracting the dryness of a Rice Krispies treat is pretty simple, and can be done by adding a single ingredient: sweetened condensed milk.

Sweetened condensed milk has a number of uses, from making Vietnamese iced coffee, Brazilian limeade, or dulce de leche, to a two-ingredient frosting. Beyond its delightful flavor, sweetened condensed milk can also create a softer texture for your Rice Krispies Treats, one that will last for days.

To make these Rice Krispies Treats, as adapted by a recipe from Modern Meal Makeover, add half a cup of sweetened condensed milk to six tablespoons of melted butter, stirring at a low temperature until the mixture is smooth and just slightly bubbling. After that, stir in a full 16-ounce bag of marshmallows and a dash of vanilla extract, until the mixture melts into a smooth sauce.

Once the marshmallow mixture has melted fully, remove it from the heat, and add in 6 to 8 cups of a cereal (or potato chips) of your choosing, pressing the mixture into a greased 9 x 13-inch pan. Six cups of cereal will make an extremely gooey mixture, one where the cereal is liberally drenched in marshmallow sauce, while eight cups will make a more conservative, albeit still-healthy ratio of marshmallow to cereal. (I opted to add in eight cups, to temper the sweetness with a little bit more crunch.)

After that, place the mixture in the fridge to cool down, for a treat that will be soft straight out of the fridge. As Modern Meal Makeover also advises, these treats can be frozen and stored in an airtight container for up to four months in the freezer.