Almond, Nut and Chocolate Popcorn Mix

I have been pinning popcorn mix recipes for months.  After reading so many recipes, I began developing three popcorn mix recipes of my own.

This week, I am sharing my first, Sallee Bonham original recipe.

My first original popcorn mix is going to be made with three ingredients: a packaged nut and chocolate mix from the local dollar store, vanilla almond bark, and fat free microwave popcorn. An optional, fourth ingredient is sprinkles or decors. I chose to use chocolate sprinkles with today's batch of popcorn mix.

What a great bag and go snack! OR sell it at your next bake sale! OR give it to dad on Father's Day! OR wow your coworkers with something sweet to eat!

Update 5/28/2014

I took five sandwich bags of popcorn mix with us on our Memorial Day camping trip. The bags were in the cooler during the trip. After arriving at our destination, I removed the bags from the cooler and kept them in a shady corner of the tent. Bill would open a bag of the popcorn mix with every intention of only eating a handful or two, but found that the sweet mix was highly addictive. He just couldn't stop until the bag was empty! On Saturday morning, I decided to indulge by eating popcorn mix for breakfast. After all, isn't it a lot like eating doughnuts for breakfast? Ahh...the camping breakfast of my dreams...a cup of strong, black coffee accompanied by  almond, nut and chocolate popcorn mix.

Ingredients

Yields about 10 cups of popcorn mix for a total cost of $5.46

1. 1 - 10 oz. bag of Nut and Chocolate Mix                                                                                
2. 2 - 2.75 oz. bags of  94% Fat Free Microwave Popcorn, popped (about 10 cups)                 
3. 24 oz. of Vanilla Almond Bark                                                                                               
4.  sprinkles or decors, optional

         

Directions

• Place popped popcorn in a very large bowl or container. Keeping the unpopped pieces out of the bowl was the biggest challenge I had with this part.
• Pour Nut and Chocolate Mix on top of the cool popcorn.
  
• Break the vanilla almond bark into cubes and place the cubes in a 6 cup microwaveable bowl
• Microwave for 90 seconds and stir. My almond bark was melted at this point. If yours is not, microwave an additional 15 seconds. Repeat if necessary.
• Slowly pour a thin stream of vanilla bark over the popcorn. Stop and stir gently.
• Repeat until all of the vanilla bark is gone. This only takes about 4-5 minutes.
• Pour the coated popcorn mix into a shallow pan and spread out.

  

  Shake sprinkles over the mixture 

• Place the pan in the freezer for 5 minutes.
• Remove the hardened mix from the freezer

• Gently break the mix into small pieces and place in a large bowl.
  

Time to eat your homemade and delicious popcorn mix!