Here's a way to turn simple (inexpensive) ingredients that you may already have in your pantry into a fun food gift.
This recipe came from the Jolly Time website, but there are loads of similar recipes out there. You can use microwaved popcorn or the old-fashioned (cook-on-the-stove-top) kind.
INGREDIENTS
8 cups Pop Corn, popped
1 cupsugar
1/3 cuplight or dark corn syrup
1/3 cupwater
1/4 cupbutter or margarine
1/2 tspsalt
1 tspvanilla
DIRECTIONS
- Keep popped popcorn warm in 200F oven while preparing syrup. (It's best to use a couple of casserole dishes or deep-rimmed cookie sheets—it just makes it easier to mix and coat when you pour the syrup over it later.)
- In 2-quart saucepan, stir together sugar, corn syrup, water, butter and salt.
- Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture comes to a boil. (This can take up to 30 minutes, so be patient.)
- Continue cooking without stirring until temperature reaches 270F on a candy thermometer or until a small amount of syrup dropped into very cold water separates into threads, which are hard but not brittle.
- Remove from heat.
- Add vanilla; stir just enough to mix through hot syrup.
- Slowly pour over popcorn, stirring to coat every kernel.
- Cool just enough to handle.
- Shape into balls using buttered hands. (The butter on your hands helps protect them from the hot caramel, as well as making it less sticky.)
- Cool on foil or buttered wax paper.
- Wrap in plastic wrap; tie with a ribbon.
