Homemade Caramel Candy Apples...fun but MESSY!

So, my mom gave this cool looking caramel/chocolate melting thingy shaped like an apple. I couldn't wait to try it! Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the caramel apples, when I grew up we always had those ones with the hard red, barley candy on the the outside...you know the ones that we so hard you almost broke your teeth trying to bite into it! Well, I don't have a candy thermometer or the want to get burned by hot molten red candied lava so I opted to try caramel ones! Here's how it went.....

So this is my really cool looking melting apple pot. Looks easy enough, right...considering it came with NO instructions. I figure pour in candy, press melt button..DONE! Not so much! When you take the top off their are 2 compartments, kind of like a double boiler but I wan't sure if I was supposed to add water or not. Well I chose to and I ended up putting in too much so when I put on the melting bowl all the water spilled over onto my countertop! JOY!

Ok, time to add the caramel to my melting pot (I had to get over the fact that it looks like my dogs food!).  I open the bag, pour it in, place the cover on my apple pot, hit melt then sit and wait.....and wait.....and wait.  Finally after what seemed a 1/2 hour I look and all I see is a big ball of melted caramel that looks like it came out of a dirty diaper! What did I do wrong!  There was no way to get this onto an apple!  I pulled the caramel wrapper from the trash read the directions (genius!).  Come to find out I needed to add 1tbl of water.  Go figure!  Once I did that it all came together!

This is what is was supposed to look like!

For toppings we chose mini chocolate chips, heath bar crunch and shredded coconut.

I didn't have any popsicle stick around my house so I ended up using chop sticks that I found in a kitchen drawer (note to self....clean out your kitchen drawers!)

I don't remember what kind of apples there were, I think they were in the Gala family but not true Gala apples.  I wanted Macintosh but the grocery store had none.  Now, I live in NH surrounded by apple orchards and the grocery store had  a crapy selection....I know they're not ready for picking yet but they must be somewhere else, right!

Time to start dipping!  It went on pretty easy I must admit.  My only problem was the caramel bag said it was enough for 6 apples.....ya, maybe 6 mini apples!  Luckily I bought two bags!

Now, the kids are by my side this whole time...mom, mom, mummy, mom...ugh....can I do mine now!  This is supposed to be fun right!  So I let me daughter take the first apple and start adding what toppings she liked...of course she picked the chocolate!  After about two seconds of this I realized I chose to put my topping in bowl that were WAY TO SMALL!  I had topping all over my counter tops!  I'm far from a clean freak but having all this stuff on my counter tops stressed me out so I took over from there!  Asked all the kids what they wanted and made their individual candy apples.

There are the final product!  They ate them last night after dinner and they were pretty good!  Not sure if they were good enough to make the prep and clean-up afterwards worth it but it put a smile on my kids face and THAT'S what made it worth while!  =)


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