In which we make caramel corn

When I took the kids to Disney by myself over winter break, I caved in to Cherry's pleadings for popcorn. Evidently she ate popcorn with her grandma (I'm not sure which grandma, as both of them have serious popcorn addictions. Perhaps it should be treated as a controlled substance?). In any case, she had been talking for weeks about how there is popcorn at Disney and how she really, really, really wanted to buy some. I had been stonewalling and maybe-ing and perhaps-ing in my turn. In any case, we ended up getting popcorn at Disney, and, much to my surprise, it was sweet, not salty/buttery. So of course Sapphire and Ezio decided that we should start eating lots of sweet popcorn. Perhaps we could start making it at home?

Well, I decided to up the ante. Instead of making sweet popcorn (basically kettle corn, though not quite as sweet as most of the American kettle corn that I've had), we would make caramel corn. I just needed to find a recipe.

An Epicurious.com search later, I settled on Caramel Corn Clusters. All the ingredients seemed pretty straightforward except one. I didn't think that I'd ever noticed corn syrup at the grocery store, and most processed food here uses wheat syrup rather than corn syrup (though I've not seen that for sale either). Perhaps I hadn't looked hard enough though. After all, I'd managed to find powdered sugar (as opposed to sucré en poudre, which is just regular granulated sugar) when I really searched.

Off to the Auchan, where we got popcorn (in a teeny-tiny little bag. I've since discovered it in the bulk or "hard discount" section), brown sugar, and a few other things. I scoured the baking aisle for corn syrup. No luck. Perhaps it was on the breakfast aisle? After all, that's where it is in some American grocery stores. No. Grasping at straws, I tried the Bio (organic) aisle. (Organic corn syrup? Seems a stretch, but I've been able to find some other things there that I haven't found anywhere else in the store.) No. Well, there was only one thing left to do (other than attempting to substitute for the corn syrup). I would check to see if they had any in the tiny British/American section of the world foods aisle. I wasn't at all confident, since I've scoured that section pretty thoroughly more than once, but I would try anyway. As it turned out, they didn't have corn syrup there, but they did have Lyle's Golden Syrup, which I've seen several cookbook authors recommend as being superior to corn syrup if you can get it. I've never actually managed to find it in Kansas, but I thought I'd give it a try.

After lunch, Ezio, Cherry, and I set out to make caramel corn. (Sapphire spent the whole day playing with Blanche and then whined about it being unfair that we had made caramel corn without her. Sometimes you just can't win.) First step was popping the popcorn, which ended up taking far longer than I remembered it taking to pop corn. On the other hand, since I don't seem to have the popcorn addict gene, I hadn't made popcorn in close to a year.

Next, we needed to make the syrup. Ezio weighed out 4 oz. of butter, and dumped it into the big pot. It was Cherry's responsibility to let me know when the butter was all melted. Once it was, Cherry and Ezio dumped in the brown sugar, and I poured in the syrup. Then we (OK, I) stirred until the mixture boiled. Since I didn't have a candy thermometer, I waited a few minutes, then started dropping spoonfuls of hot sugar syrup into ice water to test the temperature. On the second test, the syrup behaved as desired. (Some of the comments on the recipe led me to believe that perhaps I didn't actually want to heat the mixture to the 300º recommended in the recipe. I decided to stop at 250º, which is the generally recommended temperature for caramels.) Cherry dumped in the baking soda and salt, and then Ezio dumped in the popcorn and I stirred to coat it with the caramel. We decided to bake it for an hour at very low heat (as per a different recipe that I'd read).

Afterwards we pulled it out of the oven, let it cool briefly, and dug in. Come to think of it, perhaps that was the part Sapphire was upset about. We did leave most of it for after dinner and an after school snack on Thursday though.