A Betty Crocker Moment

To do: rest of laundry, fridge (didn't do yesterday), and figure out what people are getting for Christmas.  I'm making a lot of things this year, so I have to start on them...like yesterday. I have two free hours this morning while Nollie is at preschool.  We'll see what happens.

So...on to the fall activities that have been going on around here.  Here was the idea: mini caramel apples.  What could be cuter.  Especially given that I kind of...ate...enough caramels out of the bag to make it not a full enough bag to do regular-sized apples.  Not all in one sitting, mind you...just here and there...I felt pretty sheepish about it if that makes anyone feel any better.  So anyway, what could be cuter, easier, more kid-friendly than these little mini-apples you can make? 

Certainly not these...

 

There.  It's out there.  This is what happened to our Betty Crocker moment.  I guess my first red flag was when the melon-baller wasn't turning out nice little spherical mini-apples.  I guess that's why it's not called an apple-baller.  But no matter...they would still taste good, right?  I had that caramel so smooth and silky-looking, it was a thing of beauty.  All I had to do was get the sticks for the kids to poke into the little misshapen apple thingies.  I turned the burner down waaaay low, left the stove for about 7 seconds, and came back to what looked like a layer of tar on the bottom of my saucepan.  And bubbling caramel with little tar bits all through it.  But NO MATTER, I could just dip the apples in the good parts of the caramel, right?  Sure!  So, at this point, at the dipping stage, it hit me why you don't normally see caramel apples that have the skin off.  DUH!  The caramel doesn't stick to the inside so well, or even at all.  I had to take a paper towel and dry these stupid things off as well as I could, and THEN dip them in whatever caramel I could salvage BEFORE it got too cool to coat the apples.  I had to reheat it once, which was kind of the proverbial nail in the coffin.  With Abby watching me try to dip these things, asking me questions like, "is it supposed to look like that?" and "is the caramel going to taste good?" I was fighting the urge to just burst into tears.  But I held it together, gave up on the apples, and got the kids some sprinkles from the cupboard that they could roll their (un-carameled) apples in and eat.  They thought it was just awesome.  :)