Writing this week’s Nomtastic was really hard for me. This time of year is just so strange. It’s still technically summer, but once September rolls around it feels like fall. I was just so torn over what to make. Should I do one last summer recipe, or should I jump on the fall bandwagon?
It’s still 90°F here every day so I was leaning more towards summer foods, but I decided to embrace the fall in hopes that cooler weather shows up anyway. Corn is one of those crops that has fall harvest written all over it. It’s in corn bread, stuffing, and most importantly, caramel corn. Enter my husband Collin’s caramel corn recipe.
This recipe was born one night out of sheer desperation for something sweet. We had almost nothing in the house as far as sweet ingredients went so we took ingredients we always have on hand to create something most decadent and satisfying.
Ingredients
1 cup (200g) packed brown sugar
¼ cup (60ml) honey
1 stick (113g) butter
½ teaspoon (4g) baking soda
1-2 teaspoons (5 to 10ml) vanilla extract
1 cup (150g) unpopped popcorn or 2-3 bags of microwave popcorn
Handful of peanuts - optional
A tin foil lined cookie sheet.
Directions
1. Preheat your oven to 250°F (120°C).
2. Pop the popcorn and remove any unpopped kernels.
3. Combine the brown sugar, honey, and butter in a medium saucepan. Cook over medium heat stirring until mixture starts to boil. Let boil for three minutes without stirring.
4. Turn the heat low and stir in the baking soda and vanilla extract. The mixture will foam up like crazy and release a lot of steam, so be careful when you stir the vanilla extract in.
5. Pour over the popped popcorn. Stir the popcorn until it is evenly coated with the caramel mixture. (You’ll want a very large bowl for this step.)
6. Place on a tin foil lined cookie sheet and bake in the oven for one hour, turning the popcorn every 20 minutes. When you remove from the oven turn one last time.
7. Let cool for five minutes, then break apart and enjoy. Store in a ziptop bag once cool for up to one week.