Candy Popcorn for Easter (Taste and Create)

This month we were invited to join Taste and Create, a group of food bloggers who are partnered up to cook recipes from each other's blogs. We were partnered up with No Reason Needed. If you are looking for a great variety of interesting recipes, you should definitely check it out - you can see all of them listed on the bottom right of the homepage. At first we were going to bake - perhaps some "Big Soft Ginger Cookies," or a "Lemon Drizzle Cake," but with the stress of work lately, we've been indulgent, and didn't want to have more baked goods around the house waiting to be gobbled up. 

Then Amy spotted this recipe for Candy Popcorn and immediately remembered this storefront at the Fairfield Mall in Chicopee where she grew up. It was called Kandy Korn or something similar and was a bright yellow place with containers of popcorn of every color and flavor - cherry, lime, strawberry. Oh, it was amazing, especially to a kid in the late 70's with a sweet tooth. That place made the mall smell like heaven, and when she saw this recipe, it all flooded back. This was the one.

We decided on grape flavor, in honor of nostalgia. We also used one of Amy's favorite appliances, The Whirley Popper. It is simple to make, festive for the Easter holiday, and tastes just like Amy remembered. Thanks for the memories!!!

To read more about, or to join Taste and Create, go here.

Candy Popcorn

Ingredients:

1/3 cup margarine

1/4 cup honey

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 3-ounce package flavored gelatin mix

9 cups popped popcorn

Combine honey and margarine in a microwave safe bowl and cook until melted, about 1 minute on high. Stir in sugar and gelatin powder. Microwave on high until it comes to a boil and turns foamy, doubling in size, about 2 minutes. Pour mixture over popcorn in a large bowl and stir to coat. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray and turn coated popcorn onto the sheet. Bake at 250 degrees for 1/2 hour, stirring every 10 minutes. Allow to cool and store in an airtight container.

Homemade Cracker Jacks

It was a pretty busy weekend for us. Amy's school had graduation Friday night (along with some teacher celebration afterwards), we went to L's birthday party Saturday night, the ribbon cutting for the beautiful new barn at the Coventry Farmers Market (which our neighbor L had a huge part in building) was Sunday morning, then we met Amy's family for lunch to celebrate Father's Day. Sunday afternoon was spent prepping snacks and cupcakes for this afternoon's book club meeting. So when Sunday evening came, and it was time to relax and watch a movie, we wanted an easy, yummy, movie-watching snack. That's where our Secret Recipe Club assignment for June comes in.

Danielle is the author of Delicious Existence. She is a holistic health and wellness coach whose blog promotes a healthy and happy lifestyle in which raw, vegan and vegetarian foods play a huge role. She lists her recipes as "Kitchen Adventures" (which we love!), and they are indexed by picture rather than by name. It was fun exploring the site, but as much as we'd love to say we made something really healthy for us, we didn't. You know us better than that by now. We made her recipe for homemade "cracker jacks." Perfect for movie-watching.

We did make a couple of changes to Danielle's recipe, which made it not quite as healthy for us, but still delicious. We didn't want to buy "vegan buttery spread" just for a couple of tablespoons, so we went ahead and used butter, which (obviously) means our version isn't vegan. And when we went to make it, we realized we didn't have any brown sugar, so we used turbinado sugar. Also, Danielle lets hers cook in a slow cooker for about 45 minutes, while we just did it in a double-boiler, only cooking ours for about 15 minutes. We wanted quick! Nonetheless, nutty, crunchy, sticky and yummy, this snack was exactly what we wanted.

Homemade Cracker Jacks

slightly adapted from Delicious Existence

 

Ingredients:

1 cup organic turbinado (cane) sugar

1/4 cup honey

2 tablespoons molasses

2 tablespoons salted butter

2 tablespoons unsweetened apple sauce

1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon coconut oil

2/3 cup popcorn kernels

2 cups roasted, salted peanuts

In a double-boiler, over medium heat, place the sugar, honey, molsses, butter, apple sauce, vanilla extract, and cinnamon. Stir and cook for about 15 minutes, until well combined, hot, and bubbly. In the meantime, make the popcorn by cooking the kernels in the coconut oil (we do ours in our Whirley Popper), or air-pop if you desire. Mix the cooked popcorn and the peanuts in a (very) large bowl. Pour the sauce over the popcorn and peanuts and mix until well coated. Cover a couple of baking sheets with wax paper and spread the "cracker jacks" onto the sheets to cool and harden. Store in an airtight container until ready to eat.