Caramel Popcorn

This was supposed to be a post about Bailey’s Irish Cream Caramels for St. Patrick’s Day. Chewy, delicious caramel candies with a hint of Irish Cream flavor. I was going to tell you all about how to make caramels because I was confident after two successful attempts that I had all the mechanics down. I survived both adventures relatively unscathed and while terrifyingly scary, the process is actually quite simple. But of course that confidence came well before my most recent batch of caramels was actually done. And guess what. It never set. It solidified past the “sauce” stage, but never really made it to “chewy, delicious candy”. It simply hovered around the “squishy goo” stage instead. I thought about just throwing it out, but Boyfriend gave me a better idea. When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. When it hands you gooey caramel? You make Caramel Popcorn.

I melted my caramel goo back down to sauce and poured it over a big pot of popped corn. Then I threw it on a baking sheet and baked it for an hour. The result? Caramel popcorn that I can’t. stop. eating. Literally. Every time I took it out of the oven to stir, I ate some. As it was cooling I ate some. While I attempted to take pictures last night, I ate some. I ate so much of it yesterday, I thought I was going to make myself sick. I’m ashamed to admit that I grabbed more than a handful when I got up to get a drink last night... At 4am. And today? As soon as I got home from work, I sat down on my kitchen stool with the bag in front of me and just started munching away. And then ate some more as I was taking more pictures. This stuff is dangerous. I made an entire gallon Ziploc bag of the stuff and it’s almost halfway gone. If I keep this stuff around, it’ll be gone before the weekend’s over.

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I don’t have a real recipe for this because I kind of just BSed my way through it with my messed up caramel, but if you want to try your own, without the hassle of screwing your caramel candies up first, this recipe from Savory Sweet Life looks pretty good. I’ll be giving it a try with my Spicy Kettle Corn recipe when I’m finished with my current batch. And I'm definitely throwing some peanuts in next time.