Chocolate-Covered Caramel Apples!

I’ve been wanting to do some chocolate-covered caramel apples for awhile, now, but kept talking myself out of it.  It sounds stupid, but the thing that was holding me back was unwrapping all of those dang caramels.  I hate that part so very much.  To avoid the unwrapping in the past, I’ve tried to do make caramel from scratch or have tried bottled caramel with little success.  So I was back to the unwrapping. 

Then I remembered that I have kids.

Turns out, my children quite enjoy unwrapping caramels, and the caramel collateral damage wasn’t too bad.

So we prepped the apples, melted the caramel, and then came another hurdle.  Keeping the caramel on the apple.  If you set it right down after dipping, most of the caramel falls right off, so we opened a window and slowly turned the apples rotisserie-style until the caramel had set up enough that it wouldn’t puddle at the bottom when we set it down.

However, this took FOREVER.

Again, I grabbed the kids to do the manual labor, and after some training, they did a pretty good job.  After they had turned them for a while, we put them in the fridge to continue to set.

After the caramel had set came the fun part.

We melted milk chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and peanut butter chips and dipped the caramel apples, then rolled them in mini chocolate chips or toffee bits, and returned them to the fridge to set.

They turned out so yummy and most of them were pretty, too, which was awesome.

Making caramel apples was pretty labor intensive and messy, and after finally finishing them I vowed that I would never make them again. 

Until next year.