SunButter Butterfingers

Healthier homemade butterfinger candy bars with a sneaky ingredient for the crunchy nut-free filling covered in dark chocolate. Vegan and gluten-free!

THIS POST IS SPONSORED BY SUNBUTTER®

As a kid I would’ve traded all my butterfingers for one crunch bar or a couple of kit kats. It wasn’t until after my trick-or-treating career was over that I discovered just how good those peanut crunchy candy bars actually are. And it wasn’t until last week that I discovered just how much BETTER homemade, healthier, nut-free butterfingers are. But I will never go back now.

Just fill your entire plastic pumpkin with nothing but SunButter Butterfingers and it will be the happiest halloween of your life. Or happiest October 24th, why wait?

I’ve seen those butterfinger recipes that mush together candy corn and peanut butter, and my thoughts on that are a) absurd b) an insult to candy corn and c) just please no.

We’ve got much better things going on here and simpler too – just 5 ingredients!

Here’s the thing. Butterfingers need some sort of CRUNCH element inside. Since these are nut-free it’s not going to be peanuts. And since these are refined sugar free it’s not going to be candy corn. And since these are ridiculously easy it’s not going to require making or baking or creating our own crunch. It’s cereal. The answer is cereal.

Any plain (gluten-free if necessary) kind of cereal you like really, but I used crispy brown rice cereal. Emphasis on crispy, the puffed stuff won’t work here it will just get soggy. But crispy rice cereal stays crunchy and blends right into the yummy salty/sweet SunButter center perfectly.

Step 1. Make the filling with a crushed up mix of cereal, SunButter, and maple syrup. Cereal for crunch. SunButter for “nutty” (but nut-free!) flavor. Maple syrup for sweetness.

Step 2. Press into a pan and freeze until firm and easy to slice into bars. You can cut them fun-sized or treat yourself to full-sized DIY butterfingers.

Step 3. Coat the bars in melted dark chocolate. I find it easiest to coat the bottom first, place on a wire rack, cover the top/sides letting the excess drip off, and then use two forks to transfer to a pan lined with wax paper before it hardens onto the rack. But even if the coating comes out messy, chocolate is chocolate and chocolate is good.

True story: I messed up the first round of this recipe by overestimating the capacity of my food processor and not blending the cereal by itself first. So don’t do that unless you are going for a butterfinger/rice crispy treat hybrid (*insert smirk emoji here because that actually sounds low key amazing*).

Kinda unconventional. Mostly healthier. Very easy. Soooooooo irresistible.

If you can make the batch last longer than 3 days, you already have me beat.