Popcorn Balls!


For Eid, we made popcorn balls. They were super easy to make and tasty. I used a recipe from Taste of Home.com

Ingredients

  • 7 quarts popped popcorn
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 cup light corn syrup
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Food coloring, optional

Directions

  1. Place popcorn in a large baking pan; keep warm in a 200° oven.
  2. In a heavy saucepan, combine the sugar, corn syrup, water and salt. Cook over medium heat until a candy thermometer reads 235° (soft-ball stage).
  3. Remove from the heat. Add the butter, vanilla and food coloring if desired; stir until butter is melted. Immediately pour over popcorn and stir until evenly coated.
  4. When mixture is cool enough to handle, quickly shape into 3-in. balls, dipping hands in cold water to prevent sticking. Yield: 20 servings.

Things We Did:


-7 Quarts of popped corn is about 28 cups. We used 3 bags of microwave popcorn which yielded around 28/29 cups.

-I made up one batch of the sugary sweetness and poured it over the popped corn but it didn't seem like enough to coat them enough so I made another batch.

-Our corn syrup had vanilla flavoring in it already so I probably could have skipped adding vanilla but I added it anyway.

-We used two colors of food coloring (each batch of the sugar mixture was a different color). Although you can't really see it in the pictures, our popcorn balls were red, green (and yellow from the popcorn itself)

-We got about 31 balls, not sure how big each ball was, we might have made them smaller as we got more balls than the 20 the recipe says it yields.


Our mixture bubbling




Right after we poured the mixture over the popcorn



These were really good and pretty easy to make, however they make you feel like you want to run to brush your teeth directly after eating them :)