popcorn balls

So the delay here isn’t the fact that I hadn’t started my holiday baking. The delay is that I can’t seem to find time to write about about it. Indeed.

Indeed?

Indeed.

No excuses. Just the facts.

We are currently snowed in. Blizzard in Minnesota. I finished the panda hat for Morgan.

The panda hat?

Yes, the panda hat.

CHOCOLATE BALLS!

Seriously easy. I submitted the recipe to the Minneapolis Star Tribune for their 2010 cookie contest.

I didn’t win.

Very, very disappointed. Because, you know, I’m used to success.

Except for that damn Fiesta Movement contest.

Nevermind.

Here is the recipe:

Preheat oven to 325. Mix together:

1 box of graham cracker crumbs (or 48 squares crushed to make 3 cups)
1-11.5 oz package of chocolate chips
2-14 oz cans of sweetened condensed milk*

(This mixture all but turns to cement. So, being the lazy lucy that I am, I use the KitchenAid on the lowest speed.)

Pour into a greased 9×13 pan and bake for 25 minutes at 325 degrees. Watch from 20 minutes on so it doesn’t get too crusty on top. Remove from oven and allow to cool slightly, about 10 minutes. Stir mixture up in pan completely. Either butter your hands (that works best for me) or coat hands in powdered sugar (original recipe’s directions). Roll into small balls with your hands and then roll in the powdered sugar to coat. Allow to cool completely and store sealed tightly. Makes 3-5 dozen, depending entirely on the size you make the balls.

These are best eaten in the first week, though I hide my stash and enjoy them through Christmas. They just get a little hard, but I still savor every one.

*You can use light sweetened condensed milk if you prefer. But they get harder even faster.

POPCORN BALLS!

I already wrote about these here. Thank goodness I did a search on my blog just to make sure I hadn’t written about them before. And I had! It was only last year, but I had already forgotten. See? I’ve already lightened my load today!

GINGERBREAD HOUSE!

Here are detailed directions to making my pretzel gingerbread house:

Don’t do it.

I’m Serious. Only serious masochists make things like gingerbread houses. Oh, we’ll tell you it’s “so fun!” And, a “wonderful thing to do with your kids.” But that is just a bunch of hooey. If you do embark on this as a family project, don’t expect it to look anything like the beauty shown here. I did this all by myself, baby. (The kids were hiding in the basement I think.) I’ve been making these for, let’s see… 14 years? 13? –Somewhere around the time I was enchanted enough by my daughter to think making a gingerbread house together would be fun.

And you can do that. And of course I did. But I did a lot of yelling, “NO!” and “BE CAREFUL!” and, “Don’t you think THIS might look better?” I think the first couple years I eventually resorted to doing most of it while she napped and let her put the finishing touches on it when she woke up. I’ve blocked out entirely the years Charlie was a toddler…

In later years, I learned to stop being the control freak that I am. (Mostly.) And I let the kids do it all. But let me tell you the problem with that approach:

Kid’s get bored. And then they don’t want to finish. And then you, and all your control-freakishness, are left to work with what can only be called a little gingerbread house of horrors.

I’m exaggerating, of course. It isn’t all that bad. But I’d still tell you to skip it if you have a brain in your head.

And, for all of you who don’t heed that warning and want to while away about five or six hours creating this keepsake memory, I’ve got some tips for you:

This is far and away the BEST dough. It’s soft and easy to roll, gets hard in the oven before it burns, and tastes pretty good, too.
Google free gingerbread house plans. I used “the elf house” for this one, sans the chimney, which I made out of candy.
Invest in Silpat mats. I use them for absolutely everything. The cheapies from Target work just fine.
After years and years of cutting out the windows, I have come to this conclusion: I prefer them created with frosting. Black holes in the sides of the house are just plain ugly. One year we made “stained glass” out of melted hard candy. That was pretty, but also a pain. Frosting windows look better and are easier.
Use squeeze bottles for icing. It’s hard to fill them (use a small funnel), but SO much easier to use for people not good with pastry bags.
And, drumroll please… Decorate the house BEFORE assembly. Unbelievably I never, EVER did this until this year. I simply cannot believe how much easier it was. Truly mind-boggling.
Royal icing is a royal pain in the butt. It takes practice to get it right, but know this: make it too dry and it won’t stick and you’ll strain a tendon trying to squeeze it out. There is nothing you can do except take it out of the container, stir in more water and try again. Make it too runny and you’ve got a mess. All you can do is squeeze it all out, add more powdered sugar and try again. When it’s the right consistency, it is amazingly easy. Here is a good recipe for royal icing. The powdered egg whites (meringue powder) is pretty easy to find these days.
If you are doing it yourself, have a plan and a picture. Google “gingerbread houses” and look at the pictures.
If you are doing it with your kids, forget the plan. Have a glass of wine instead.

This year I used pretzels exclusively. It was tediously and strangely fun. Here is the roof. It took about two hours.

And yes, I was drinking wine.

I used jelly bellies cut in half for the cobblestones.

I used — oh what are they called — burnt peanuts? For some reason I want to call them boston baked beans. Was there a candy like that? They are brick-red pokey round candy-coated peanuts. I cut them in half and made a chimney going up the back of the house.

I’m a terrible frosting decorator. I don’t take my own advice (above) and try to use frosting that is either too runny or too dry. I do it every year. Can’t seem to learn. I used powdered sugar for dusted snow. And then I was done.

And now I’m done. Approximately four hours have passed since I sat down to write this.

Fatty needs another popcorn ball.

A Christmas Tradition.
And A Giant Weight-Off When They are Done.

Every year, the weekend after Thanksgiving, I head up to my Mom and Dad’s in Hayward to do an insane amount of activity in about 48 hours. The usual list includes making:

Chocolate Balls (coming soon!), Popcorn Balls, Cornflake Wreath Cookies (with my own lazy twist) and a Gingerbread House. I also then make a wreath with boughs my mom has leftover from a big wreath-making extravaganza weekend with friends. And finally, when I think I can take no more, my 69 year-old mom, with far more energy than I, rallies me into the car to go get my cheap christmas tree from a church lot up there.

Then, I hop in the car with my two kids and usually my niece, but occasionally a nephew or two, and head home.

I would like to say that this weekend is a warm and fuzzy, calm and cozy time of memory making. The reality is that my TV-starved kids, let loose at the cabin, out from under their Dad’s watchful eye, turn into 18-hour TV zombies while systematically clicking off the DVR’d episodes of CSI, NCIS, the Mentalist and anything else my parents have squirreled away.

I know, I shouldn’t let them. But the truth is I don’t really care. At least not for this one weekend. We don’t watch TV at home and I fear I am creating the kind of monster I occasionally brushed up against as a kid. The kind whose parents didn’t let them eat candy or junk food and would somehow find themselves at my house where there was always bags of chips, fun-size candy bars, ice cream and pop. My mouth would hang ajar as I watched these seemingly normal kids come unglued in an uncontrolled eating frenzy. It always seemed to me that if the parents had demystified candy and let the kids figure it out, they wouldn’t be such fiends. But who knows.

I really fear that I am just such a parent in the TV department.

I blame it on Dave.

He’s a bit of a control freak, you know.

But I hate TV, too. So I go along with it.

To a point.

What the heck? How did I get going on this tangent? For crying out loud. Back on point.

I’ll cut to the chase and stop beating around the bush: No, the kids don’t help me with the baking. Ironically, they think that I am a control freak.

Funny, isn’t it?

Anyway, I have learned to let certain things go. Like the gingerbread house, for example.

But the popcorn balls? Are you insane? Sorry, but unless you are cruel, don’t make your kids help you with these.

I have never, ever had a popcorn ball like this recipe makes. It was my Grandma Esther’s recipe and she taught me how to make them a few years before she died. I taught my mom (I love to say that), and now we make them every year. We guard them with our life and never offer them to guests. They are too precious.

I wish I was kidding.

Because I feel bad about that, I would like to share the recipe so that you can make them yourself. It takes my mom and I about two hours to make eight batches. That’s how many we need to make it through Christmas. Each batch makes 8-10 popcorn balls.

It’s easy. Just a pain. First, you pop all the popcorn and then measure 8 level cups into a big bowl.

Then you cook the syrup. Remember: DON’T STIR!

Pour over the popcorn:

And mix it all up really good:

Butter your hands and form them into balls. Work QUICKLY! (Don’t worry, my mom always makes funny faces like this. I’m not worried about her wrath for posting it because, remember? She doesn’t READ my blog! Revenge is sweet. And Dad? Don’t tell on me.)

Then sit back and have a beer before you move to on to the dreaded wreath-making project:

(which of course by that time of the night you will open another beer for duration of wreath making. Preferably a Negra Modelo.)

Pop enough popcorn for the amount of balls you plan to make. For our 8 batches, that amount is a heaping grocery bag full. I use a StirCrazy popper and it works great. I always lightly salt the popcorn as I go.

CALIBRATE YOUR THERMOMETER! Candy thermometers are notoriously inaccurate. Calibrate it by putting it in boiling water. If it doesn’t read 212 F, then make note of how high or low it is and adjust your recipe accordingly. My mom’s cheapo (which broke in the middle of our frenzy this year) is off a whopping TWELVE degrees. If I hadn’t known that, the popcorn balls would have been ruined. Don’t take this step lightly.

In a regular sized saucepan, add

1/2 c sugar

1/2 c brown sugar

1/4 c butter

1/4 c light corn syrup

1/4 c water

1/8 – 1/4 tsp salt

food coloring to make the colors you want.

Place all ingredients into a medium heavy bottomed sauce pan and bring to a boil. DO NOT STIR. You may gently swirl the pan in the beginning melt stage, but then just leave it alone.

Boil to 240. It will rise to about 235 fairly quickly and a take another minute or two to reach the last few degrees. Be sure to take any thermometer inaccuracies into account at this point!

Immediately take off heat and pour over 8 level cups of the popped popcorn (use a large 8 cup measuring bowl to scoop and measure popcorn into a large bowl). Use a rubber spatula to get every last drop of syrup out of the pan.

Stir syrup into popcorn well, so that kernels are evenly coated. Using the rubber spatula, be sure to keep scraping the bottom, where the syrup pools.

Butter your hands well (to protect from heat and to prevent from sticking) and begin forming into small balls. Work quickly! It gets harder to form balls as syrup cools.

Place balls onto waxed paper.

That’s it!

Here’s a few tips:

Begin with the lightest color and work to the darkest. For example this year we made yellow, orange, and 2 batches of red. Then I cleaned the pan by swirling in hot water to get most of the color out. Then we did 2 batches of blue and then 2 batches of green. That way you don’t muddy the color and aren’t cleaning the pan after every batch.

Store the balls in the giant, 2 gallon zipper bags to keep from drying out.

Hide one of the bags somewhere no one else knows about. That way, when Dave (aka ‘the skinny German’) eats four every night and they disappear long before the allotted time, you will be able to have some for yourself.

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