Super Bowl Caramel Corn

It's Super Bowl Sunday, practically a national holiday with its own genre of cuisine, and so in the spirit of bad-for-you snacks, I present Oven Caramel Corn, a homemade version of Cracker Jacks, most closely identified with that other American pastime, but perfect for football too.

It's easy to make, and much better than the store bought variety, trust me.

Begin by popping some corn.

Careful, for even though I make popcorn five nights a week, I still managed to burn this batch. I wasn't used to making it in the Le Crueset, with its amazing ability to retain heat.

Place the popped corn in a bowl while you prepare the caramel.

Place butter, brown sugar and Karo syrup in a sauce pan and heat.

Wait until it comes to a boil and cook for about five minutes.Add the salt, baking soda and vanilla.

Then pour over the popcorn, which you've placed on baking sheets or in a large roasting pan.

Mix together to spread the caramel. I used large tongs for this, but a large spoon would work as well.

My scanner appears to be broken, so I photographed the vintage recipes I used, and have written the recipe out below. Since each of the recipes is slightly different, I used some instructions from each.

Oven Caramel Popcorn

Preheat oven to 250 F

Popcorn
Two sticks of butter
1/2 C. Karo white corn syrup
Two C. packed light brown sugar
1 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1 t. vanilla

Pop the corn in a six-quart pan. (My method: Add canola oil to the pan to cover the bottom. Add one layer of popcorn. Cover and use medium heat. When the corn begins to pop, shift the cover so that a little air gets in. When the popping stops, remove the pan from the heat.)

Place popcorn on baking sheets or in a large roasting pan.

In a two-quart saucepan, combine butter, syrup and sugar. Cook over medium heat until combined and boil about five minutes. Add the salt, soda and vanilla.

Pour mixture over popcorn, and using tongs or a spoon spread it as best as possible.

Place into warm oven.

Every 15 minutes for one hour, stir the popcorn to distribute the caramel.

Remove from oven and enjoy.

Keep in an airtight container. You can add peanuts to the popcorn prior to putting it in the oven to make homemade Cracker Jacks.

The Perfect Super Bowl Snack: Coconut Butterscotch Squares

These bar cookies are every bit as addicting as a really great football game, so why not make them for the Super Bowl?

They're easy to make and even easier to eat.  In fact, when DH brought them to work one day, a colleague took one, came back for another and later instead of exiting the building after taking the elevator down five flights, turned around and rode another car up to get a third.  

The coconut and pecans for the topping.

Like all recipes, one must pay close attention to this one.  I didn't and paid for it. Instead of making the bottom layer with brown sugar, I used white.  The result was so bad that even I couldn't eat this mistake.

My mistake, dumped out on the kitchen counter.

What the crust should look like (except in real life it wasn't this blurry!).

When I was young, my mother sometimes made something called Seven Layer Bars, in which chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, nuts, coconut and more were layered atop a graham cracker crust, with sweetened condensed milk poured over the whole thing.  And then baked, of course.  They lasted about an hour, they were so good.

The recipe for Coconut Butterscotch Squares is probably a precursor to that one.  It's most likely from the 1940s, and incorporates more traditional baking techniques, like using eggs as a binder.  Desserts of that era were a simpler by necessity, for ingredients like butterscotch chips didn't exist and anyway our American palates hadn't been introduced to the over-the-top desserts typical of the past 20 years.

So enjoy these 1940s treats at the 2011 Super Bowl, which is akin to one of my favorite things: watching a black & white movie on the TCM channel while flying on Jet Blue.