I am so in love with this puppy show. It tastes awesome and is SO addicting! It’s adorable and totally festive for Valentine’s Day. It’s easy to make and inexpensive. AND, as far as sweet treats go, it’s fairly guilt free. Does it get any better?
The day I took pictures of this beautiful puppy chow, the hubs was helping me out holding some things. I was all focused on my pictures, when I hear crunching. I look up at him and he’s smiling and stuffing his face. He was in love. He declared that people were going to “love this stuff.”
That night we had some friends over and it didn’t stand a chance. Gone. He was even happier at that point because he was right. Can you be right though if I never disagreed? Oh well, I’ll let him have it. 😉
And I’m so in love with the little boxes I put it in. I got them from World Market for 69 cents each. They are the perfect size. And the cute ribbon is out of the $1 ribbon bin at Michael’s near the register. You can also find boxes like these at Michael’s, but I’m not sure of the price and I think they are a little bigger. Either way, they make a super cute Valentine’s Day treat to give someone. And they’re a little different than the typical candy.
And again – easy peasy. You just melt the white chocolate (separately – there’s white and red), mix it into the rice chex (again separately) and coat it with the powdered sugar for the vanilla cream and with the strawberry cake mix for the strawberry. Stir in the M&Ms and bam! Perfect treat!
So go forth and make it! Then eat it all! You know you want to. 🙂
NOTE: This is not for dog consumption.
Strawberries and Cream Puppy Chow
5 oz white chocolate or white vanilla candy melts
5 oz red candy melts (Found in craft stores like Michaels and Hobby Lobby)
5 cups rice chex cereal, divided in 2 parts
1/2 cup strawberry cake mix
1/2 cup powdered sugar
M&Ms
1. Put 2 1/2 cups rice chex cereal into a medium sized bowl.
2. Slowly melt white chocolate in the microwave, stopping it every 30 seconds or so to make sure it doesn’t burn.
3. Add melted white chocolate to chex cereal and lightly stir to coat evenly. Be careful to not break the chex cereal too much.
4. Add the powdered sugar to the white chocolate covered chex cereal and lightly stir to coat evenly with powdered sugar. You could add the chex cereal and powdered sugar to a ziplock bag, then shake, but save yourself the bag.
5. Repeat the same process with the red candy melts and strawberry cake mix (instead of the powdered sugar).
6. Allow to dry completely and then combine the two kinds of puppy chow together and add M&Ms.
Enjoy!
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Hi, my name is Lindsay. I'm a wife and puppy mom. This blog is a place to share my love of sweets and life.
lifeloveandsugar.wordpress.com 
oh this looks amazing! genius with the strawberry cake mix, i never would have thought of that! puppy chow is a weakness of mine, so i will have to remember this one! and you’re right those boxes are perfect, and SO cute!
Thanks Carrie! I’m so in love with the boxes! 🙂
Lindsay – I love the puppy chow! The two different colors is so pretty. Almost too pretty to eat. 🙂 Almost! Valentine’s Day will be here before we know it.
Thanks Sally!
Looks awesome Dub! I plan on trying this one for sure- awesome ideas yet again! 🙂
Thanks Nelly!
Made this for my daughters daycare! Delicious!
Thanks for sharing Tara! I’m so glad you liked it!
What are red candy melts? Are they in the candy or baking aisle?
Hi Carrie! Red candy melts are kind of like white chocolate. They are vanilla flavored. You can find them at craft stores like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby. I think you can even find them in Wal-Mart.
Very cute, and I love regular puppy chow!
Thank you Amy!
This looks great! What do you do with the rest of the box of cake mix? Can I make the strawberry cream cheese bars with a little less melted butter and milk? And maybe make them in an 11×7 pan?
Hi Caroline, yes that’s a great idea! There’s usually about 2 1/2 cups of dry mix in a box, so if you used 1/2 cup for the puppy chow, you’ll have used about a fifth of the mix. Just reduce the butter and milk for the bars about a fifth and you should be good. The other thing you could do is that there are a number of recipes on the blog for things that use a funfetti cake mix – you substitute one of those for the strawberry cake mix. For example, the rice krispie treats, the pancakes or the ice cream pie.
Looks so yummy and I wanna make it for my Co-workers at world market! I always wanted to do something like this for Christmas now they might get different colors for different holidays! I will be the chex crack dealer! Keep em wanting more!
Haha, great idea Karyn! What an awesome co-worker you are to have! 🙂
Love this! Got all my ingredients today & im makin’ this for my mama 2moro 4 Valentine’s Day♥ Thanks for this spectacular idea girl. She’s guna L0VE itttt…. 😉
Thanks Lonnie! Happy Valentine’s Day! 🙂
what are red candy melts?
sorry! I Just went through all the comments and saw this question was asked already.
No problem! Happy Puppy Chow making 🙂
Love this! I just made cherry puppy chow using cherry gelatin. Love the cake mix idea too!
Thanks Aimee! The gelatin is an awesome idea too! You’re making my mind go in crazy directions, haha!
Do you just mix the red candy melts with loose cake mix?
Hi Helen! No, you want to use the cake mix in place of the powdered sugar for the red candy melt covered chex. So for the white chocolate chex, you coat those with regular powdered sugar. For the red candy melt chex, you coat those with the cake mix. That way you get strawberry flavored chex and “cream” flavored chex. Does that make sense?
Sorry, but I find it hilerious you had to give the disclaimer that it’s not for dog consuption!
Hi Christine! It does seem a little funny and although I’ve never been asked myself, I’ve seen the question posted elsewhere so I figured I’d jump the gun and go ahead and answer it. I think it may be that people from other parts of the world aren’t familiar with puppy chow. 🙂
Reblogged this on ally_haslett and commented:
sweet
I just made some of this as part of our 14 days of love. I think my hubsy may try to eat the whole bag at once!
Haha! I’m glad you are enjoying it! I love the 14 days of love idea – that’s awesome!
My chocolate didn’t cover all the ches cereal – is it supposed too?
Hi Rachel! Yes, it should cover all the cereal. You should have used 10 oz of chocolate total (5 oz white, 5 oz red) and 5 cups of chex divided between the 2 colors. It may take a few minutes of stirring to get it coat the chex fully, but if you need to you can certainly add a little more chocolate. Keep in mind though that the powdered sugar and cake mix will also coat the chex and make it all look more fully coated. There should be enough chocolate on the chex that it can stick to the powder.
Hi Lindsay- Thanks for sharing this idea! I found it on Pinterest and I’m glad I did because I also love your blog! Hannah 🙂
Thanks Hannah! I’m so glad you found the blog! It means a lot that you enjoy it! 🙂
Love that this doesn’t contain peanut butter! I’m going to make it for my son’s preschool Valentine’s Day party. Do you know about how many servings you were able to get out of one batch?
Hi Marta! Great! Thank you! It makes 5 cups of puppy chow, so it depends a little bit on what you want the serving size to be. I’d think a cup would be a fairly good serving size (which would give you 5 servings), but for a party for young kids where they may be getting lots of treats, you may only want to do 1/2 cup servings (which would give you 10). I hope that helps!
What’s the shelf life? I was going to start making it tonight for a party Sunday.
Hi Kristie! That is totally fine. The puppy chow should be good for at least a week.
Thank you so much for sharing this recipe, I had never thought of using cake mix for this, however I do have a question, I just made this and I found that I still needed to add some powdered sugar to the cake mix part because it seemed really sticky, for future reference should I have to do this or will it still dry?
You are so welcome, Susan! Thank you for your comment! As for your question, that didn’t happen for me so I can’t say for sure why you had that problem. I would think that once the chocolate completely dries, you shouldn’t have any sticky issues. Unless it’s the cake mix that is sticky, in which case it might be good to let that dry out a little before you coat your chex mix with it.
Thank you for replying, maybe cake mixes react differently, Or maybe I am just too inpatient, but the powdered sugar worked like a charm it’s all drying really good and I’m having trouble keeping my hand out of it, it is sooooooooo good. It’s been so long since I’ve made puppy chow, but it’s so good to know now that you can make it with different cake mixes so now I feel like the possibilities are endless. My daughter is almost 3 now and I have a feeling that this is one of those snacks that we will be having around the house quite often.
*impatient
First I wanted to say thank you for sharing this idea, I can’t wait to use it. But I did have 2 questions. I see that in ur picture u have sprinkles and chocolate hearts .. does that help the taste overall or is it just for decor? Also what if ur not a chocolate lover(let me be specific Im ok with white chocolate but not the rich brown chocolate, I know that’s silly but it just doesn’t taste good to me so I don’t eat it if I don’t have to) . Is there a subsitute u can use that keeps the sweet and salty taste? Thanks for ur help.
Thanks for your comment, Emily! You are very welcome! The sprinkles and chocolate hearts are actually all from the same sprinkle jar (from Target) and were just for looking festive in the pictures. They don’t affect the taste. And as for the chocolate – you could totally leave out the M&Ms and this would still be an awesome tasting puppy chow. I’ve sometimes seen white chocolate M&Ms like at Target or Walmart. You could try to find those. There’s also usually some kind of white chocolate candy, even just a candy bar, that you could use and either chop it up a little so that they are smaller pieces or maybe use as is. I hope that helps!
If I dont have access to the red chocolate can I just use red food dye in the white for one of the batches?
Hi Kelly! You could certainly use red food coloring. The only thing is that it could take quite a bit to actually get a true red. You’d most likely want to just make it pink with a little bit of red added to the white chocolate. That would look great too!
I’m trying to make 40 cups so I don’t really want to pay for the red candies as they are more expensive, do you think I could just do the white with all of it and then half with powdered sugar and the other half with red velvet cake, to give it the red color?
Hi Jacey – you could try that, but I’m not really sure how red they’d turn out. It’s quite possible that the red velvet mix would give you a nice red color, I just can’t say for sure since I haven’t done it myself. Certainly it would still taste great! Another option is that you could use some red food coloring and just add a few drops to get pink and have white and pink chocolate. If you try the red velvet, I’d love to know how it turns out!
okay so I did make these today, the red velvet cake mix wouldn’t work cause I opened the package and it was brown not red. So I did do the food coloring with the strawberry mix and that worked great. Also for those wondering about making a full box here is what I did:
1 box (13 cups) Chex Cereal (I used rice)
2 (12oz) bags vanilla chips
3/4 cups strawberry cake mix (in 1 box strawberry cake mix there is enough to make atleast 5 boxes worth of this strawberry puppy chow chex mix)
3/4 cups powdered sugar
1.5 cups M&M’s (not quite a whole bag)
divide into 6 cups and 6 cups (even though the box says 13 it was more like 12)
1 bag vanilla chips per 6 cups ( I added about 1/2 tsp or so red gel food coloring) then did the strawberry cake mix with that 6 cups
and 1 bag vanilla chips and 3/4 cups powdered sugar to the other 6 cups.
I made a new pinterest pin and linked it to your site, as I put them in snack bags (makes 16-18) about 1 cup each. And then I created a 5×7 photo and printed it and folded it in 1/2. see my link for the photo. Thanks so much for this! Love it!
Sounds good will try tonight for tomorrow. Wish me good luck!
Good luck! Have a happy Valentine’s Day!
Made a double batch of this today to send in cute treat bags for the V-day festivities in my 8 year old twins’ classrooms! Couldn’t find strawberry cake mix at my little local store so I subbed a cherry version and it turned out amazing! Thanks so much for sharing this recipe. Gotta love Pinterest!
You are so welcome! I’m glad you like it! Happy Valentine’s Day!
So my daughter has a Valentines party tomorrow for school and she decided that of course she loves puppy chow and strawberries and chocolate Is perfect so we decided to make this recipe… I didn’t have strawberry cake mix on hand but I did have strawberry nest quick so I made a little mixture of strawberry nest quick and powdered sugar and use that instead. It was delicious!!!
What a great idea to use the Nesquick! My husband loves that stuff! I’m glad the puppy chow worked out for you! Happy Valentine’s Day!
I made two boxes of this mix tonight. Didn’t really measure out just melted, mixed and dumped. Took me less than 30 minutes. Both my husband and oldest were swooning. Thanks for a quick and easy treat idea!!
Also, I didn’t want to buy the red candies so I just mixed in some gel food coloring to half of my melted white chocolate. It made a pretty pink color for the strawberry flavored pieces.
You’re welcome! I’m glad you all enjoyed it! I just love how easy it is. 🙂
With a Puppy Love theme in my son’s classoom (and a student with peanute allergies) I opted for this over Chex’s Valentine mix. I added some of the new Scooby cereal (mini bones – vanilla) and passed out puppy origami valentine papers to do while they ate, turned out cute for kids! What a great recipe!
Thanks Rachel! I’m glad you liked it! Happy Valentine’s Day!
these photos are absolutely beautiful. I know I’m a month over, but I could seriously use some of this right now.
Thanks Katie! No worries – strawberries and cream is good year round 😉