Candy Bar Caramel Corn

I love that fancy popcorn with drizzles of chocolate and all sorts of extras mixed in.  So when I saw this recipe I knew I had to try it.  I've made caramel corn before and always used my super big bowl.

For the popcorn I used this great gift Jonathan and I got for Christmas this year from Mike & Julia.  It works great.  Nearly every kernal pops.  It only takes about three minutes in my microwave and a third of a cup gave me 8 cups.  I decided to double the recipe... so I made 3 batches. 

For the candy bars I used Peanut Butter Snickers...

Twix..

Kit Kats...

and butterfingers.

Once the popcorn was done

and the candy bars all chopped up and mixed

I started on the caramel. 

While the butter melted I covered a couple of half sheet pans in aluminum foil and sprayed them. 

The recipe doesn't specify a temperature or anything for cooking the caramel, just times.  But it worked out nice and hard, but that might be because of the baking step at the end. 

After the caramel was done I got Jonathan to dump it over the popcorn while I kept the popcorn moving so I got a pretty good distribution. 

I kept stirring until there wasn't any caramel puddled anywhere and the popcorn was covered pretty well.  Then I stirred in about half of the candy bars.  The caramel was still warm enough that the chocolate all melted. 

Then I spread the popcorn on the two prepared sheets and stuck them in the oven.  I stirred them after about 5 minutes and then cooked them for another 10 minutes. 

Cooking it in the oven melted all the caramel and peanut butter from the candy bars too.  The caramel set up really nicely.  I spread the remaing candy bar pieces and let the whole thing cool.

I managed to fill 30 snack bags with all this stuff.  Yum!  At about 200 calories it's perfect for a little snack/sweet... as long as I can stick to one a day.  :-)