How to Bake Holiday Caramel Popcorn

Rosemary Spoljarick: Hi! I am Rosemary Spoljarick and we are making our Caramel Popcorn. We are ready now to complete our mixture and prepare it to go over our popcorns. Now, you can see about three minutes, it has elapsed by and our mixture has come to a boil. What we want to do now is get this mixture all frothy and we will take one teaspoon of the baking soda, which will cause the mixture then to get foamy and frothy. Okay alright so, you can it s starting to foam up a little bit and we just want to mix it, just for few more seconds. Okay, if you see that it s not getting frothy enough and typically if you have a saucepan about this size, it is going to come up to about may be two inches below the rim. So, our mixture now, our caramel is ready to go over the popcorn. It’s going to be poured over top. You want to make sure, you get it all scraped out of the saucepan and just let it coat right over your popcorn. Okay, make sure you get your burner off and set your pan aside and then you got your mixture over your popcorn and your pecans, just take your spoon and mix the ingredients all together. One thing, I think was good to mention to you as well is that in order to help minimize you’re clean up, there is nice foil, and there is aluminum pans that you can buy at any grocery store or supermarket. The roasting pans, those are great as well because you can mix your popcorn in there and then once you are done you can just throw them away. Okay so, you have your mixture and keep in mind once you have poured the mixture over the popcorn and the pecans, you are not going to get everything coated initially. What we will do then is place this popcorn in the oven and that will allow the caramel to continue to melt and then we will mix it, a couple of time while it is cooking and baking in the oven and then the coating will be pretty much well over the popcorns. Okay well I believe we have our popcorn well coated. So what we will do is we will take the roaster and we will put it in the oven, as I said before it is preheated at 250 degrees. We will place the roaster in the oven and after about 10 minutes, we will remove the popcorn. We will mix it again, place it back in the oven for about another 10 minutes and mix it again. Once, we are done taking that through two cycles in the oven then we will spread wax paper across the counter, spread out our popcorn so that it will become crisp and ready to eat. You want to make sure though that you separate that popcorn and keep separating it and you will notice that it gets this nice crunchy texture and that is due to the cream of tartar that you place into the mixture that add that crispiness. So if you want little more crispiness to the popcorn you can always add a little bit more. But what I wanted to show you right now though is, with this kind of a holiday theme going on here with this popcorn, certain things you can do for the holiday season is, I found just for my own experience that actually I have friends, relatives, and co-workers that look forward to getting their popcorn every year. So, what I found that your craft stores and just any kind of supermarkets also will have these treat bags that are nothing more than like a plastic bag that you can put your popcorn in and seal it up. They have some nice holiday bags that you can give to teachers as I said co-workers. We have nice little treat bags that you can pass out for kids treat at school and then of course no place better than just to have it at our own home. Just put it in some tins, year around just put it put a nice clear container and have it sitting at all you around so you that you can enjoy the popcorn. So I hope you enjoy it and people will certainly love it for gifts. So definitely take advantage of that. It is not a very expensive way to spread some holiday cheer and certainly give a gift that will certainly have your mouth watering. So just enjoy.