10 Time-Saving Tips for Making Pink Popcorn

OUR BEAUTIFUL PINK POPCORN!

Ever made pink popcorn? Me neither. But, now I have. I'd be doing you an injustice if I didn't share my 10 Time-Saving Tips for making Pink Popcorn that I learned by trial and much error. First, a bit about me. I have two personality traits that annoy even me. 

1) I think I can do ANYTHING! Really, I can. I mean I hope someone don't ask me to lock myself under water and try to get out like the Great Houdini, but short of that, I.can.make.pink.popcorn. How hard can it be? 

2) I can't say NO. If there's a need, I think I'm the answer. Sometimes it's just better to say "No, I really don't know anyone who can make pink popcorn." and go on about my day...unless it's for a great cause like the American Cancer Society and Pamper Your Princess Day and the person who needs the popcorn is a long-time friend! Because what Princess don't deserve a mouthful of delicious, sugary, dreamy pink popcorn!

Anyway, I'm schooled in the art of pink popcorn making so it's only fair I share the 10 time-saving tips my mom and I learned. Btdubs, my mom gave me the two horrid traits so she's always my project recruit! Ready to make some popcorn!

We tried several recipes. We found the best one here at Domestic Dreamboat. Her recipe coats 24 cups of popcorn perfectly and is DELICIOUS! After much trial and error, here's our 10 time-saving tips for making pink popcorn.

1. The way NOT to do it. Microwave in a Pampered Chef Rice Cooker with oil, butter, food coloring, popcorn, Karo syrup and sugar. The rice cooker is in the trash. Burnt it up! Don't try the microwave method in a glass container, does not work either. This is what you'll get...

2. Give your air popper a rest every batch (24 popped cups). Your air popper will wind up in the trash heap if you don't, burnt up just like the microwave popcorn.

3. Give your microwave a rest every batch (24 popped cups). Your microwave will wind up in the trash heap if you don't, burnt up just like the popcorn. Yes, we lost this microwave too!

4.  No fancy containers needed to make microwave popcorn. Use a plain brown paper lunch sack and plain old-fashioned popcorn kernels in the microwave. Works beautifully! Pour about 1/3 cup of unpopped kernels in the paper bag, fold closed and pop about 3-5 minutes listening for popcorn to stop popping and remove. Grab a new brown paper sack about every 1.5 cups of kernels popped.

5.  You'll need two large four-pound dishpans to measure and mix your pink popcorn. Divide a 24-cup recipe using 12 cups of popcorn per dishpan for best results. When popcorn is coated pour all into one pan and continue to mix until popcorn is coated evenly. The kind we used is pictured below.

6.  Wax paper works well to cool the coated popcorn on. Try to lay your popcorn in a single layer for quick cooling. The pink coating will harden as it cools. Your popcorn should break apart easily for packaging.

7.  Reduce sugar by adding plain popcorn to a batch of pink popcorn. Children eat way too much sugar! We experimented adding some extra white popcorn to each pink batch to reduce the amount of sugar per package. After our 24 cups of popcorn were pink coated, we added about 6-12 cups of uncoated plain white popcorn to the pink and mixed it. Worked very well.

8. We used Wilton Pink Icing Color. Worked well but it's difficult to measure. We had varied colors of pink popcorn which weren't really a problem....see #9.

9.  We used Wilton Color Mist to supplement color (just spray it on); 

a) to color some of the white popcorn we added, and 

b) to add more color if our pink mixture just wasn't pink enough for princesses!

10. We produced 80 princess bags of pink popcorn in 4.5 hours containing about 1 1/2 cups of popcorn each! We made four batches of the pink popcorn recipe adding plain white popcorn every batch. We found one of our batches (after compression of pink candy syrup and the addition of 6-12 cups of white popcorn) filled 20 bags. Our time includes trial and error and success and we are not slow studies either. 

A blown up air popper, a burned out microwave, five brown paper sacks and two exhausted old ladies were sacrificed making pink popcorn but no animals were harmed! I told my friend if anyone wanted to know who made the pink popcorn, please don't mention our names (we can't make anymore)! lol Pink Princess Popcorn was a great one-time experience. I hope the Princesses enjoyed every minute of it! Contrary to what this blog might imply....We did!

She's smiling but can't keep her eyes open!

Resting in pink,

Tammy

The Happy Handicap