Regular caramel corn is great on it’s own. But when you really want something different this treat hits the spot.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup butter
- 2 cups brown sugar
- 1/2 cup corn syrup
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 5 quarts popped popcorn
- 1 bag white chocolate chips
Directions
- Preheat oven to 250 degrees F (95 degrees C). Place popcorn in a very large bowl.
- In a medium saucepan over medium heat, melt butter. Stir in brown sugar, corn syrup and salt. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil without stirring 4 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in soda and vanilla. Pour in a thin stream over popcorn, stirring to coat.
- Place in two large shallow baking dishes and bake in preheated oven, stirring every 15 minutes, for 1 hour. Remove from oven and let cool completely before breaking into pieces.
At this point, you now have very tasty, crunchy and addictive caramel corn. You can stop here. Or, you can take things one step further.
Melt 1 bag of white chocolate chips using a double boiler. Spread the melted chocolate all over the inside of the bowl (I found using a spachula for this worked best). Next, add your cooled caramel corn to the bowl of melted chocolate and mix.
Once coated, lay out the chocolate caramel corn onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Let cool for 2-3 hours before breaking up into pieces.
Tips
- It is much easier to work with steaming hot popcorn when you are tossing it with the caramel.
- Have everything measured in advance. Trust me.
- Do not try to cook anything else while you are making the caramel. It can burn very quickly.
- You can also mix in almonds, peanuts, and dried fruit when adding the popcorn to the chocolate.
- To bake the caramel corn, I have found the best containers are the throw-away turkey roasting pans you get at the grocery store. They are less than $3.00 and with a good wash can be used more than once.
6 Comments
Add YoursOh my god! That looks delish!!! Deff goin to be trying this out!
Thanks Camilla! It’s so easy to make I’m sure you’ll love it. You can also cut down the sugar and butter a bit if you want (since I know you’re into more healthy things)
Sounds delicious. What method would you recommend to produce that amount of popcorn. A hot air popper? I just do microwave stuff at this point.
I actually find using a pot on the stove to work the best and is the easiest. I put about 2 tbps of oil in the pot and a few popcorn kernals, put it on medium high and wait for those few kernals to pop. Once they do, I add in 1 cup of kernals (I can get a huge bag at Walmart for about 1$) and it only takes about 2-3 minutes to pop. While it’s popping I usually shake the pot a few times (must be an old habit from making jiffy pop!). I leave the lid on right until I’m ready to mix it with the caramel to ensure the popcorn stays super hot (makes it so much easier to mix up with the caramel if the popcorn is still very hot). Thanks for your question, it was a good one!
This sounds like a great snack…something different to chips.
You can add sea salt while it’s cooling if you want to make it salty and sweet!