Thursday, November 5, 2009

The Scary Pea and Caramel Popcorn

I was told this morning that I was “one of three peas in a pod…and it’s a very scary pod.” Nice, huh? I laughed and laughed. My Hannie cracks me up.

So, I tried to bake last night. My mom absolutely hates when I’m in “her” kitchen. :) Apparently I’m a messy cook. Not only that, but it never fails. I ALWAYS screw up the recipe. Somehow, I always manage to forget some very important ingredient (should I chalk that up to not fully reading the recipe??).

Last night was no different. I had my mind made up to make some goodies (fall favorites) for some of my favorite people. And OH, how cute they would be in mason jars, with fall fabric at the top with a gold ribbon. Sounds good, right? Well, I looked through some recipes and decided that I was going to make pumpkin cakes, puppy chow, and caramel popcorn.

The first big flop was finding the mason jars that I had bought. I only found 5 of the 12. How this happened, I will never know.

I started the caramel popcorn as soon as I got home yesterday (I will mention here that “Supervising Cynthia Kay” wasn’t home…so maybe I can blame the first bad batch on her). In this batch, I forgot the vanilla flavoring and the baking soda. Oops….Those shouldn’t have been super important ingredients, right?? According to mom (via cell phone) they were… But still, the result was still very yummy.

The second batch, had the prettiest color. We popped that pan in the oven and in just an hour, our pretty popcorn had turned into bitter-tasting burnt popcorn balls. This batch was thrown in the trash.

The third batch, I realized (after I had put it in the oven) that I had forgotten to half the vanilla in it (I was making ½ a batch, rather than the full amount…so it’d be easier to manage). So it TOO came out bitter tasting.

After all my sampling, and cooking, I am quite sure that if I ever see, smell, taste, cook, etc. caramel popcorn again it will be entirely too soon.

Meanwhile, the puppy chow was super simple to make. And for me, not nearly as messy as I had thought it would be. The problem…it made far less than what I had thought.

Even though I had some problems (a lot of problems actually), I did end up bagging up a little bit of the popcorn (from the first batch, I might add, that had been made with a few errors and without supervision). And the mason jars turned out SUPER cute.

So, my attitude is now…If my favorite people get a pumpkin cake and/or puppy chow and/or possibly one of the jars of popcorn, they damn well better be happy and feel loved because it will probably be a while before I step back into my mama’s kitchen.

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