Pop Corn Balls

Looking for something fun, cheap and colorful to serve at a party? I was, and I found this in my lovely box of McCall’s Great American Recipe Card Collection from 1973. So long as you don’t mind getting your hands DIRTY, you’ll have fun with these Popcorn Balls!

My daughter and I made them for a holiday party – they’re called Christmas Popcorn Balls – but we felt the subdued colors shown on the recipe card were WAY TOO SUBTLE! So we went heavy on the Jell-O (Jell-O used to provide sweetness and color to pop corn? Oh YEAH!!!) and added a lot (quite a lot actually) of food coloring. Usually I avoid the stuff, but come on – for the holidays? Go crazy. We did!

These balls are fun to make and they have that sweet-salty thing going on that just works, thanks to the aforementioned Jell-O as well as chopped peanuts. I think perhaps I preferred the other flavored popcorns I have made just because there was less mess and goo all over your hands (see recipe for Pink Party Pop Corn here) but they are fun and tasty, and we will make them again. Just plan on spending more time than you thought humanly possible trying to roll the damn stuff into balls, while at the same time scraping it off your hands… this without just giving up and eating handfuls. Actually, I discovered that if the stuff is mostly cooled off it is much easier to form into balls, and then you also don’t burn your flesh with boiling Jell-O.  Um yeah… popcorn balls. 

Ingredients - yes, Jell-O!!!

 Hot Jell-O with food coloring - how can you go wrong???

Here we are at the Christmas party with the Pop Corn Balls! Happy Holidays :)

Pink Party Pop Corn

From the iconic book, “Popcorn Potpourri”, (1977) by Larry Kusche (check out his snazzy trousers!) comes this bizarre and yet addictive food product: pink party popcorn. I’m not suggesting you make any of this, or if you do make it, stick to using it for modeling crafts, not consumption…

Still! Pop Corn is always fun, and having found a whole book on it (and one that features the very Hot Air Pop Corn Popper that I had growing up on the cover), I offered to make any recipe in it for Ivy. And naturally, she picked THE grossest one. No, she couldn’t pick something mellow like a nice cheddar cheese coating, or herb butter pop corn. Nor did she pick any of the somewhat creepy sounding ones like Pop Corn with Mushroom Butter, or Pop Corn with Chicken Flavored Butter. This book is filled with literally hundreds of pop corn recipes: The variety! The possibilities! And so, the one pop corn experiment thus became the Great Pop Corn Taste Test, where we tested plain pop corn with salt, the dreaded concoction below, and one that I came up with myself, where I melted a Toblerone bar and drizzled that over plain pop corn. That, strangely, was not bad! Hello, Pop Corn Party! (Later: Hello, Tums…)

To make the Pink Party Pop Corn, I was reminded of something I used to do about once a week in Junior High: make Rice Krispies Treats. The unmistakable scent of melting butter and marshmallows: mmmm… but then adding Jell-O in powder form to it… makes it a veritable sugar bomb, and also disturbingly bright. I was horrified by the stuff as I mixed it up, but then something happened, and I… HAD TO EAT IT ALL! We could barely even do a taste test, because I was so busy gobbling it up. And it turned out that Ivy, who selected that recipe, preferred the chocolate version. Either way, I still say pop corn is fun, but I know to step away from the marshmallows, lest I become a Pink Party Pop Corn addict!



Pink Party Popcorn

(actual note from the book: you can match the color of the popcorn to your decorating scheme.)

3 Tbsp butter
1 ½ cups miniature marshmallows
4 Tbsp strawberry-flavored gelatin
2 qts. popped popcorn

In a medium saucepan, melt butter over low heat. Stir marshmallows into the melting bitter. Let them soften but not melt completely. Add the gelatin. Stir until butter-marshmallow mixture is evenly colored. Gelatin does not have to be dissolved. Drizzle over popcorn and mix well. Makes 2 quarts.