We have apples coming out of our ears.
For real.
You can read all about our apple picking adventures here. For some reason I always say we're not going to get that many apples this year...
And then we wind up with gobs and gobs of apples. Budget fail! Because they always go bad, ya know? It really is true that one bad apple ruins the whole bunch...
Anyway, so I've been trying to use up these dern apples and I decided to just go for broke and make something super nutritious...
Caramel apples. Which sounded super easy until I realized I have never made them. So here's what I came up with and what I learned along the way...
I made my caramel sauce in the slow cooker. I found a bowl that fit in my crockpot that still had room around it so I could lift it out. I am sure this will be different for everyone so just mess with your bowls until you can find one that works for you.
And by the way if you need a crockpot you can buy the same one I have on Amazon. And right now it looks like it's on sale for 45% off for only $29.99. You can click here to check it out. Deal!
Anyway, I then opened up the two bags of caramels that I bought at the store. I got about half way through unwrapping one when I got this great idea and called in the kids to finish the rest. I have no idea how many they ate. I decided to turn a blind eye and not judge them.
Anyway, a few minutes and a ton of wrappers later they were done and all of the caramels were ready to go.
I then poured water carefully AROUND the bowl (not in the bowl). You have to play around with this too. I think I ended up with about 6 cups of water. I say I think because I dumped a bunch of water in there and then when the bowl began to float I had to take some out. As difficult as caramel apples are I didn't want to complicate things by having to follow a bobbing bowl around in the water.
I then turned my slow cooker to high and let it go. I stirred it about every half an hour to see how it was coming along. My caramel took about two hours to get soft enough to dunk apples into. The photo is what it looked like when it was time to dip. I posted that one to show you what it should look like. I didn't think it would be ready but upon completion of stirring it was ready and we were thrilled!
I dipped the apples just as a precaution but the caramel didn't get too hot so I probably could have let the kiddos. But safety first! As you can see I used popsicle sticks and just jammed them in there about half way through the core. None fell out which was good. And no one had kabob skewers to try to impale each other with so even better!
I would like to point out that these caramel apples are not what you would call "magazine perfect" but they are what you could call "kid perfect" because they helped and loved them and to me that's all that matters. And besides who doesn't like an apple with ooey-gooey caramel running down the sides?
We dipped half of the apples in sprinkles and the other half left bare. I was thinking nuts but we had these when we had new friends over and I wasn't sure about nut allergies. So maybe nuts would work next time. I'm also posting these AFTER Halloween because I thought that chopping up leftover candy and using it as a topping would be a really great idea!
My mother hen piece of advice here is to make sure you really scrape down the bottoms of your apples before you put them on the wax paper. The caramel will ooze that way as God dictated that's how gravity works, so only scraping a wee bit off results in this big boogery end. Which is just all caramel and sprinkles which can't be totally bad, right?
Oh and I thought that was my last bit of advice but it wasn't. Make sure you spray your wax paper with a cooking spray. We did not and on some of the apples I was stuck (get it? ha!) trying to pick wax paper pieces off of the apples. Not so fun.
I hope you enjoy making your own ooey-gooey caramel apples!
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