Kitchen Disaster Popcorn Mix

On Wednesday, this blog post was supposed to be an update about coating popcorn with almond bark and mixing in a cranberry nut trail mix that I found at the local Wally World store.

After shuffling some ingredients around on the pantry shelf, I discovered that I had forgotten to buy vanilla almond bark AND chocolate almond bark. Dang it!

Substituting white chocolate chips was supposed to be the solution to this problem. However, my genius brain decided that the melted white chocolate chips were too thick. The solution to that problem was to melt butter with the chips. This is a solution if you melt the butter to the same temperature as the melted chocolate before you mix it together, but I didn't do that.

 Nope, I just chunked up the cold butter and stirred it into the melted white chocolate. The chocolate promptly seized. As a watcher of cooking programs, I have seen chefs and cooks say that their chocolate "seized". Now I know exactly what that means. The thick, melted chocolate became a gummy, stiff, granular mass.        

                                                                

Now what? Fortunately, there was a bag of  milk chocolate chips in the pantry. Putting melted milk chocolate on popcorn wasn't my favorite choice, but getting a blog post done caused me to go ahead and follow this plan. The melted milk chocolate chips were thick and going to stay that way!

After stirring the chocolate into the popcorn mixture, I carefully spread it out onto a wax paper-lined tray and put it in the freezer for five minutes like I do with almond bark. Carefully I pulled the tray out of the freezer. The chocolate promptly began to sweat and return to a thick, sticky state. OMG! Now what? Bill was the recipient of a bowl containing sticky, chocolate covered popcorn mix. Then, I dumped the rest of the mess into a repurposed ice cream bucket and went to bed.

Yesterday, I took the lid off of the ice cream bucket and found that in the eighteen plus hours that I had ignore it; the milk chocolate had returned to a solid state on the popcorn. Milk chocolate coated cranberries could be my new food crave! Bill and I ate most of the bucket while watching Grudge Match last night.

Moral to this story:

No almond bark on the pantry shelf means no popcorn mix in the bucket.

Ingredients

Yields about 10 cups of popcorn mix 

1. 1 - 10 oz. bag of Cranberry Nut Trail Mix (main ingredients are dried cranberries, peanuts, sunflower seeds, and dark chocolate chips)                                                                               
2. 2 - 2.75 oz. bags of  94% Fat Free Microwave Popcorn, popped (about 10 cups)                 
3. 12 oz. bag of milk chocolate chips                                                                                             

       

Directions

• Follow package directions and pop the popcorn in your microwave
• Place popcorn in a large bowl
• Add Cranberry Nut Trail Mix to the popcorn
• Melt chocolate according to package directions
• Slowly stir into the popcorn mix
• Spread onto a wax paper-lined shallow tray
• Allow to dry until the milk chocolate is hardened.
• Put into a large lidded container. I used a repurposed ice cream bucket.

To make some vanilla almond bark coated yumminess follow the recipe for my original popcorn post.