My family and I had great fun making these cute popcorn balls for Christmas this year. These are traditional treats, and although the process is a little messy it is worth it. You can also experiment with different flavor extracts to make each taste a little different. We made the green balls vanilla flavored and red ones peppermint flavored.
Yield: 6
Red and Green Popcorn Ball Recipe
Prep Time
15 minutes
Total Time
15 minutes
Ingredients
- 12 cups unsalted popped corn
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup light corn syrup
- 1/3 cup water
- 1/4 cup butter
- 3/4 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 teaspoon flavoring, we used vanilla and peppermint
- 4-5 drops of food coloring
Instructions
- Pop the popcorn. We use air popped, but you could also pop it on the stove.
- Combine the sugar, corn syrup, water, butter, and salt. The syrup needs to be cooked until it reaches 270 degrees. We didn't have a candy thermometer so we let it come to a boil and then cooked it for about 2 minutes more until it started to thicken and cling to the spoon.
- Remove it from the heat and add the flavoring and food coloring.
- Pour the syrup over the popcorn slowly, stirring constantly. This step works better with two people, one to stir and one to pour.
- Let the popcorn cool a little bit, and then use buttered hands to firmly squish the popcorn into a ball shape. We had popcorn ball shapers from Jolly Time, but we found that we still needed to use our hands to make it all stick together. We used about 1 cup of popcorn per ball, and the recipe made six.
Notes
Nutrition facts are estimates.
Nutrition Information:
Yield:
6Amount Per Serving: Calories: 198Saturated Fat: 4gCholesterol: 20mgSodium: 359mgCarbohydrates: 33gSugar: 33g
those sound great (except we don’t do artificial color) I love popcorn balls. They make me very nostalgic. They remind me of all the good stuff from long ago.
Now I’m craving popcorn! LOL!
Yum! And super simple and fun with the kids! 🙂