Caramel...

Caramel has got to be one of my most favorite treats in the whole wide world! I love making caramel during the holidays, Halloween it is good to dip apples and caramel corn and then again at Christmas time when we dip it in chocolate and give it away.... YUMMY Caramel.



Here is my recipe for caramel...

1 cup Butter
2 1/4 c. Brown Sugar, packed (1 lb)
Dash of Salt
1 cup Corn Syrup
14 oz. sweetened condensed milk
1 tsp. vanilla

Melt butter in a saucepan. Add sugar and salt, then stir thoroughly. Slowly stir in corn syrup and then sweetened condensed milk. Cook over medium heat until a firm ball forms, approximately 12-15 minutes. Pull off of heat and add vanilla. Pour into a buttered dish, either 8x8 for a thicker caramel, or 8x13 for a thinner caramel. Variation: Chocolate caramel, add 2 oz. unsweetened chocolate during the sweetened condensed milk stage.






After making my caramel I split it in half, first the kids and I made some caramel apples. I let the kids decorate their own apples with crushed up oreo cookies, mini M&M's, nuts, candy, whatever, and they had a lot of fun....

Then I made a few as well. I packaged up this one and gave it away as a gift with the cute little fall card to go with it.

Next we took the other half of caramel and made some fabulous caramel corn. Just had to pop up some popcorn and then drenched it in caramel. I was going to drizzle melted chocolate over the top of the corn while it cooled, but decided to save that treat for another day. The caramel corn was divine.

As another gift for someone else, I took the popcorn, and put it inside of a cake decorating bag. The popcorn wouldn't fit all the way down at the bottom of the cone shaped bag, so I decided to add some color with some mini M&M's. Then filled it with caramel corn and topped it with a ribbon and tag (not shown). Mmmmmm... looks good enough to eat.