Last night at church we met together both the Young Men and the Young Women for our activity and they asked me to make some refreshments. I found this recipe awhile ago and pinned it for just this occasion. It comes from the “Tasty Kitchen” website and while it isn’t a difficult recipe to make, it is time consuming, especially when you are making four batches. I made cherry, grape, berry and lemon and, surprisingly, I thought the lemon tasted the best although the kids ate almost all of the other three. I found popcorn treat bags at the dollar store for serving so I just set the bowls up buffet style with scoops and let them have at it. You could have a lot of fun with recipe, matching the color to whatever event is taking place.
2 cups sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
2/3 cup butter
6 quarts plain popped popcorn
2 packages Kool-Aid, any flavor
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 Preheat oven to 225.
2 Boil sugar, syrup and butter together for 3 minutes.
3 In a large, shallow ungreased (I greased mine and it was fine) baking dish (I used a large cake pan, about 18′ x 24″ is my guess), spread out popped popcorn.
4 In a small bowl, combine Kool-Aid with baking soda.
5 Remove sugar syrup from heat and carefully stir in Kool-Aid mixture, this will make the sugar mixture puff up so be careful not to get burned.
6 Now take sugar mixture and pour it over the popcorn. Carefully mix it until it is all combined.
7 Place it in the oven and stir every 10 minutes, repeating 3 times.
8 Take popcorn out of oven and let cool, then break into pieces (I put it into a greased bowl straight out of the oven and let it cool there then put it in a large brown paper grocery sack to break it up and then back into the bowl for serving.)
Here are the other flavors (cherry is pictured above):
this is the berry and here is the lemon (my phone died right as I was taking a picture of the grape so no grape!):