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Sure you can BUY caramel apples at the store, but what fun is that? I mean, it’s certainly easier, but more fun? Never. I asked L if he wanted to make them and he was totally into it, so we went to the store to pick our toppings. It’s not exactly the smartest idea to allow your 4 year-old to pick candy toppings. His ideas included sour patch kids. And licorice. Gross. I steered him towards some more traditional toppings and we ended up with mini m&m’s, mini chocolate chips, nuts, butterfingers and oreo’s.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to melt caramels and instead of GTS’ing like a normal person, I took matters into my own hands and decided to use a mini crockpot. Bad idea. More on that later. I had L take the wrappers off the caramels and put them in the crockpot. He happily worked on this and tried to sneak caramels while I wasn’t looking. Ha.
While the caramels were “melting” in the mini crockpot, we got to work on the toppings. The m&m’s, nuts and chocolate chips were easy. But we had to crush the oreo’s (L picked the berry flavor – I am 99% sure he picked them because they have pink frosting) and the butterfingers. I put them in their own individual ziplock bags, gave L his plastic hammer and told him to go to town. OMG, he thought this was amazing.
Seriously. He’s game for anything that will allow him to use his tools. After we got all our toppings together and ready, we put sticks (I used cake pop sticks) in our apples.
This also involved the use of the hammer. I should mention that I used the smallest apples I could find at the store. I am a realist and know my kid isn’t going to eat the entire apple. He’s going to first eat the candy / caramel off and then maybe try the apple. So we gotta keep these small you know?
It’s about this time I am thinking that the caramel in the crock pot was a bad idea since it’s not melted up. So I got L all ready for bed and then we declared the caramel done and went to work.
L was a super good helper and made sure we did one of each type of topping. And then we did the final as a mixture of the others. Tasty ;). Oh and there was A LOT of caramel on each apple. It was a little thick. I would try to microwave it or melt it on the stove next time. They may not look amazing or perfect, but we made them and I know L is super excited about trying one today (it was too late last night).
Now it’s your turn, what’s your favorite caramel apple topping? And how in the world do I heat caramel? The microwave? The refrigerator? Tell me!
(*) It seems like so much work and you get messy. And I’d like all the contents of a caramel apple, I just don’t like then all together.
