Christmas Popcorn

I was at a Christmas party the other day where someone brought a bag of popcorn that had some drizzled chocolate and peppermint on it.  It was sooooo addictive so I thought I would try my own version of it at home.  It was a comedy of errors, but turned out so tasty that I ate so much I feel a wee bit ill.  

First I popped some popcorn.  I put 1/4 cup of popcorn kernals into a paper lunch bag and microwave about a minute and a half.  I did it a second time, just to give myself a nice big batch.

Next, I covered a pan with parchment paper and spread the popcorn out pulling out any unpopped kernals and burned pieces.  Yes, I do have a lot of both.  I blame my microwave.  More on that later...

Next was the melting of the chocolate.  I melted about a cup of chocolate chips with 1 Tbsp of crisco and 2 Tbsp of butter (you know, so it's a really lowfat snack).  I have always found that mixing it with crisco made the chocolate easier to drizzle, however, I only had 1 Tbsp in my unopened package and didn't want to open a new one.  

Here's the bad part.  I went to do it in the microwave but about 10 seconds in it started making this terrible noise and there were flames inside the microwave.  Lovely.  So bye bye microwave.  Perhaps my next one will pop popcorn better.  

Then, I attempted to make a double boiler since I don't have one.  But, somehow my chocolate got too hot and got all clumpy so I had to start over and just melted some in a little saucepan over VERY low heat with some butter and it worked just fine.  I would definitely suggest checking out the about.com article on melting chocolate if you don't do it very often. 

I Drizzled the chocolate over my pan of popcorn, then sprinkled with the tiny red and green crunchy balls to make it a little Christmasy.  Then of course I remembered that my husband doesn't really like those, so perhaps that means I won't have to share ;)

To finish it off I sprinkled on some salt because I LOVE salty things with chocolate.  I pretty much live for the dark chocolate covered pretzels from the Wythe candy store in Williamsburg, VA and the dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sugar and sea salt from Trader Joe's.  I have to say that this popcorn turned out almost as tasty.  I didn't bother with trying to do any peppermint, but maybe next time I'll give that a try.