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4 January 2012

Toffee Popcorn Bark

I had to look at this lined tin every day for a month
Happy New Year to you. I trust you had a lovely break from routine to enjoy the festivities? I certainly appreciated time with family, great feasts with roast beasts, and a some quality Christmas television. Without wishing to sound negative though, I've been bothered by headaches and colds through most of November and December. This kept me out of the kitchen, and at times, off work.

I had decided to make a few treats for Christmas presents and I really liked the look of this recipe from November 2011 BBC GoodFood magazine available here.

I lined my 20 x 30 cm baking tin one evening ready to start the following day... and then didn't revisit it for a month as I fought off a virus. How annoying.

Some weeks later, I was able to get back to business.

The recipe calls for two 30g bags of popcorn, but I chose to buy a larger bag of Butterkist toffee popcorn and use 60g. It's more economical and I wanted to use only whole corns, no crumbs.

This also left me with a sizable portion of popcorn to accompany a Christmas movie. (Home Alone is my favourite).

I chose to use 200g each of Tesco Finest Swiss white chocolate and milk chocolate. I decided to melt the chocolate over a pan of simmering water. The trick here is to use a small (milk) pan and 2 medium or large bowls. The important thing is not to let the bowl touch the water.

Keep stirring as it melts, so that the runny chocolate doesn't cook whilst you are waiting for the lumps to melt.

I cautiously poured half of the white chocolate into the tray, followed by half of the milk chocolate. I used a spatula to swirl the two together and spread it out a little.

After scattering on the popcorn I poured on the remaining chocolate and gave it another brief swirl.

You can see that I didn't push the combination to the very edges. I was a little worried about not covering the popcorn fully, causing it to go soft.

Once it was set, I chilled it in the fridge for a couple of hours, then roughly broke the bar into 8 pieces, putting two pieces per bag.

I can say that it in a tightly tied bag, it kept well for at least a week and was quite delicious when I sampled it on Christmas Day.

This simple recipe was a great success. One relative who prefers dark chocolate, and avoids white chocolate, found the combination quite agreeable, and couldn't get enough of it.

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