Marshmallow Popcorn Balls

The previous weekend, I made 100 of these colorful marshmallow popcorn balls to give away to friends and coworkers. Similar to rice krispy treats, they are easy to make and just as yummy. Since these were for Christmas, I made mine red and green but I can just as easily see these popcorn balls in tiffany blue or lavendar as wedding favors.

You can find the original recipe here on allrecipes.com but I found it a little too sweet and gooey so I've altered it a bit.

Ingredients:
12 cups of popped popcorn

1/3 cup of butter + extra to grease your hands

10 oz marshmallows (large or small)

4 tablespoons of flavored gelatin

cooking oil (for popping corn)

* Makes 15 - 3 inch popcorn balls

Step 1: Place 3 1/2 tbspn oil in a pot with 1/2 cup of popcorn kernals (just enough to coat the kernals) and wait for the pot to heat up. When the corn starts popping, shake the pot so that the heavier kernals settle to the bottom - this will get the unpopped kernals closer to the heat and prevent the already popped ones from burning. Also, remember to occassionally open the lid to let some of the steam escape - nobody likes soggy popcorn.

Step 2: Place 12 cups of your popped corn in a large mixing bowl and set aside

Step 3: Melt the marshmallows with the butter. The original recipe used a saucepan for this step but I hate washing pots so I melted mine in the microwave instead. Just place the marshmallow and butter in a microwave safe bowl and heat on high for 1 minute. Remove and stir 'til all the marshmallows are melted.

Step 4: Stir the flavored gelatin into the marshmallow mixture. To get the red and green color, I used cherry and lime. Below is a picture of the slime, I mean lime mixture. The gelatin won't dissolve completely so don't freak if you can't get rid of all the gelatin granules.

Step 5: Pour your marshmallow mixture over your popped corn and stir to combine. A butter knife works nicely for this. Conversely, you can pour the popped corn into your marshmallow mixture instead but this will require more work to get an even coating on your popcorn.
Step 6: Grease your hands with some butter and shape your popcorn balls. I placed a chunk of butter between my bowl and my finished tray of popcorn balls and just made a quick swipe before shaping each one.
Step 7: Place popcorn balls in bags and wrap with a bow (saran wrap will also work :-)

These really are super easy and so much fun to make. I dare say it took more time to package and tie the bows than it did to actually make the popcorn balls, lol. There's still 9 days before Christmas, I just might make another batch :-P