I love my friends. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I could change them a little bit. The thing that bothers me the most about a lot of my friends is that they don't have the same love (okay obsession) as I do with all things sugar. I try my best to sway them over to the sweet side...sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. But no matter what, I keep trying to beat out the more salty snacks. So when I was debating what I should make to bring for my first weekend at my Newport summer house, I knew I hit gold when I came across a recipe for caramel popcorn in the style of cracker jacks. A lot of recipes I saw for caramel corn used corn syrup, which I wanted to avoid. I really liked that this recipe used a real caramel with sugar, water, and butter.
I tweaked the recipe a little bit, because I wanted a sweeter rather than spicy caramel corn. My tweaking involved adding just a bit over 1/4 tsp of cinnamon and decreasing the cayenne to a little pinch with the baking soda. Other than that, I followed the recipe exactly. A half cup of popcorn pops up to a good volume, so make sure the pot you make it in is large enough to accomodate it (mine was just barely big enough and the lid was lifted up by the popped corn!). I mixed in the peanuts to the popcorn and began the caramel.
So exciting that it popped right over the sides of the pot!
Once the caramel was an amber color, I mixed in the baking soda and spices, poured it over the corn and peanuts, and then gave it a good mix before spreading it on silpats that I had set up in two sheet pans. I like using my silpat for this type of work, because its a good non-stick surface.
The caramel popcorn cooling on the silpat
Let's hope that this combo salty-sweet snack has my friends leaning towards the sweet side! Well that is if the popcorn makes it up to the house. Since it popped, I haven't been able to stop popping bites!
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks!
Maybe my friends aren't so bad after all!
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