Shut the front door!

It's suddenly kinda cold around here.

So I figured I'd boil up some sugar and dunk some fresh Ohio apples in it.

Oh yeah, I'm talkin' about boilin' down that sugar til it's golden, stirring for what seems like hours, watchin' the red line in the candy thermometer slowly crawl up to the magic number.

HOMEMADE CARAMEL APPLES, BABY!

This isn't my recipe.  It comes from Cooking Light Magazine. I'm a big fan of Cooking Light. I particularly like to buy the books they publish at the end of the year with the whole year's worth of recipes and NO ADS. Each one has an index so you can search by type of food or ingredient.

A link to the recipe is here.

Here's what you need to know about this recipe that is not mentioned in the instructions.

Use a good heavy-bottom or anodized aluminum pan, something that conducts heat well and evenly. Sugar and cream can burn or over flow easily. The heavy pan will help you manage the process. But importantly, DON'T WALK AWAY FROM THIS while it's boiling.

If you are not an experienced candy-maker--and I am not--you'll need every ounce of patience you can muster. Once the sugar and cream mixture gets to a certain temperature, the rise in temperature slows down considerably. What the recipe says takes about 45 minutes actually took more than an hour. And at some point you might be saying to yourself, "For cryin' out loud this is never going to get to 235 degrees!"

But it will, it will. You just have to be patient. Don't turn up the heat to try to speed up the process. My electric burner was only on "3" at the end boiling stage, maintaining a good rolling boil, requiring moderate stirring, not boiling over, but eventually reaching that thick consistency we all know an love.

Then as soon as it reached 235 degrees Fahrenheit, I transferred it to my old aluminum double boiler because it's narrow and deep and it worked great for dipping the apples.

The recipe said it would do 16 small apples. It did 10 medium size apples.

I chopped up peanuts, chocolate chips and butterscotch chips to dip them in. I dipped some in one topping, and I dipped a few in all three toppings. Of course the fatty toppings make up for the fact that it's a low fat Cooking Light recipe. As I think I've mentioned, I live to eat!

I'm falling down drunk at the following parties:

Debbiedoo's Newbie Party
Ironstone Nest Transformation Tuesday
Our Delightful Home Show Me What You Got
Skip to My Lou Made by You Monday
The Dedicated House Make it Pretty Monday