Given that food prices seem to keep rising and rising, and my boys keep wanting to eat more and more (sheesh!) I’ve been looking for ways to save money around here.

One treat that most of us just LOVE is Muller corner yogurt. Each package has yogurt and a topping like cherry sauce or granola. A big favorite is the chocoballs flavor. The yogurt comes with these little candy balls that are white and milk chocolate. They’re crunchy and delicious. Unfortunately, one package costs $1.19. It’s easy to spend waaaaaay too much money on just this one thing each week. I tried to compromise and buy them only when they were on sale, but even at 90 cents a package, it was just too much money.

I switched back to buying the large container of yogurt. The Dannon Oikos quart size is 32 ounces and costs me about $4. The Muller corner yogurt is 5 ounces for one dollar. I save over $2 by purchasing the larger container. Plus, most of the time people tend to serve themselves only 3 or 4 ounces, so the quart container lasts longer.

After an extensive search at several stores I conclusively established that chocoballs are not a product in individual can just go out and buy. My next solution was to purchase the Nestle Crunch Buncha Crunch box and sprinkle those on the yogurt. This was tasty, but not ideal. I’ve learned to like dark chocolate and the milk chocolate just wasn’t perfect. In addition, I had to pay a dollar for 3 ounces of the candy. I thought a homemade solution would be cheaper.

So then, inspiration hit. Why not make my own chocoballs? How hard could that be??

It turns out, it’s not too difficult. I melted down some chocolate chips, stirred in a spoonful of coconut oil, and then added crisp rice cereal. I stirred in enough cereal so that everything was coated and could stick together and all of the chocolate was incorporated. Then I spread it as thinly as I could on a piece of wax paper and chilled in the refrigerator.

After about an hour I chopped up the result as well as I could and repeated the process with white chocolate candy coating and cereal.

As for cost. I spent $7.99 for a 72 oz package of chocolate chips at Costco. I figure I used 4 ounces for a cost of 44 cents. I used maybe an ounce of cereal which comes to 14 more cents. The white chocolate candy coating was more expensive because I didn’t get it in bulk. I will in future. I estimate an additional 14 cents for cereal and then $1.50 for the coating. All told, that means I spent $2.22 on my topping. But I got 12 ounces out of the batch and again I bet it’ll last longer because not much is needed.

Both Captain Earthquake and TechnoBoy discovered the resulting treat and wanted to try it. I had run out of yogurt by the time TechnoBoy cam along, but it didn’t seem to break his heart to have to eat candy by itself.

Here’s what it looked like: (Please ignore the orange bowl. By the end of the day all of our bowls have been used and I was too lazy to wash one. Thank you.)

Once we’ve eaten these up I definitely plan to make it again. If I can find a way to chop the pieces up smaller with less effort, I’m going to do that. Otherwise, it’s pretty doggone nice.

And less expensive, for the win.