caramel apples

Happy halloween to everyone!

Tonight Corey was at the church for Fright Night (an event for the youth), so the kids and I packed up and headed over to my friend Jessica's house.  The agenda?  Make a batch of candied pecans and caramel apples.  

There is a technique to making caramel apples that I need to learn.  I'm nowhere near close to making a good looking apple.  But taste wise, it is delicious.  Here's how it went down.  My fabulous friend Melissa lent me her apple dipper so first things first, we set up shop.
hmmmm...do you notice a little gremlin in the background of these shots?  Mr. Jagger was uber-interested in what was going on and wouldn't keep his grubby little hands off of things. He swiped that apple from me ;)
Then of course, it was time to melt the caramel. mmmm.........Pour the melted caramel into the apple dipper and start dippingand rolling in goodness
then place on a cookie sheet to set up.  The first one was so pretty and I thought to myself, "hey, this is a piece of cake!" and that's when I looked back over to the apple I had just dipped.

What the .....?
It all drooped to the bottom.  Dang it.  We figured we must be layering the caramel on too thick so we tried to take it back a notch, which helped, but not completely.  We tried sticking them in the freezer to set before rolling them but that didn't work much better.  So I decided to just settle for droopy bottom apples.  They still taste good, so very good.  

Here's how I wanted them to look.

And they'd start out that way, but after a few minutes sitting on the cookie sheet, they'd become that droopy mess.  Oh well, no worries.  

We still made quite a few. It was fun.  I have a recipe to make mini caramel apples with the kids (when they're a bit bigger) and I think I'm going to make it a halloween tradition.  I can't wait :)