Valentine’s Day is RED HOT

All this week in the Tearoom we are celebrating Valentine’s Day!  Would you like YOUR Valentine’s Day to be Red Hot???  Well check in here every day and there will be a new post sharing a recipe that uses one of the quintessential Valentine treats…cinnamon red hots!

Red Hot Popcorn

Ingredients:

6 qts. popped popcorn (about 1 cup unpopped)

12 oz. red hots (cinnamon candy hearts)

Sugar – note: put the red hots into a measuring cup and pour enough sugar over them to come up to the 2 cup mark

1 cup butter

½ cup corn syrup

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. oil (preferably cinnamon oil if you can find it – if not use something with a bland taste that won’t interfere with the other flavours in the popcorn or something that will coordinate well with it)

Instructions:

Grease a roasting pan with butter and pour in the popped popcorn. Place this in a 250 degree F oven while preparing the rest of the ingredients. Put the red hots, sugar, butter, corn syrup, and salt into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the baking soda and oil. Pour this mixture over the popped popcorn and toss to coat. Put the roasting pan back in the oven and continue to bake this for 1 hour. You need to give it a stir every 15 minutes or so. When you remove it from the oven, use a metal pancake flipper or spatula or something similar to free the popcorn mixture from the bottom of the pan but leave it in the pan to cool. Once completely cool, break up into pieces. If you store this in an airtight container, this will keep for about a week.