3/4teaspoonflavoringwe used vanilla and peppermint
4-5drops 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.