Food... well more like Sweets!

We used to tease my sister for taking pictures of her food, but looking back, carving hearts into radishes and decorating bunny cakes was quite impressive. A lot more so than slabbing cherries on top of cupcakes. Still, I have become quite the fan of food pics, Kelly half expects it anymore. Now for the Rocky Road Caramel Corn... I made this for Mother's Day treats and shared the extras with some friends, feel free to play with the recipe. I have used Pecans and Chocolate Chips for a "Turtle Caramel Corn."

Ingredients:

1 cup butter (I use unsalted)

2 cups brown sugar

1/2 cup corn syrup

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla extract

5 quarts popped popcorn

Optional (as much or as little as you want):

chopped walnuts

chocolate chips

mini marshmallows

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Directions:

Preheat oven to 250*

Spray 2 shallow baking dishes (I use 9x13 pyrex dishes) with Pam.

Place popcorn in dishes.

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Melt butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Stir in brown sugar, corn syrup and salt. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil without stirring for 4 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in baking soda and vanilla. Pour in a thin stream over popcorn, stir to coat.

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Bake in preheated oven, stirring every 15 minutes, for 1 hour.

Mix ins:

You can bake the nuts with the popcorn for the whole hour, or I recommend adding them at least for the last 15 minutes. After the hour of baking I usually transfer the popcorn into a large bowl and stir in the chocolate chips and marshmallows. Then I spread the mixture onto a wax-paper lined cookie sheet, to completely cool before storing in a ziploc bag.

Hope you enjoy and let me know if you come up with any fun mix-in ideas!

Christmas Crafts

This year (or 2011), in lieu of baking three million different cookies to pass out to our neighbors, I opted to just make a ginormous batch of Rocky Road Caramel Corn, and a small batch of Turtle Bark. My intentions were to simplify, but I failed to remember that the caramel corn is quite involved. I'm thinking next year Georgiana and I may tackle gingerbread and sugar cookies. Turtle bark on the other hand is dangerously easy, like so easy I want to whip up a batch and eat it all up right now. My pants appreciate that we do not have any pecans...
As for Christmas gifts, I successfully made two this year! I had so much fun making these, I am already making some more next week with my cousin. Knowing my love for my sander and my need to use my Cricut splurge item, my friend Lindsey emailed me this Sign Tutorial LINK. I pretty much followed her directions step by step, using the Cricut in place of her silhouette machine. Also, I discovered that if you already have a sander, it is much more cost effective to buy inexpensive pine wood at Home Depot than to buy 'pre-made signs,' aka sanded pine wood, at the craft store, they will cut it for you too! For these signs I bought 12x12" sheets of vinyl, but for the next projects I am going to try out the 30' roll of vinyl (possibly shelf protector?) that I found at the Depot. If it works, that too will be a money saver!