Simple & Delicious Homemade Caramel Corn

This homemade caramel corn recipe is super simple, delicious and a traditional holiday treat I love to make year after year!

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My mother always baked us so many delicious treats each fall and Christmas and her homemade caramel corn was something we always got excited about. She would make a huge batch each year as long as I can remember, and would store it in a giant glass jar with a metal scoop.

This delicious, buttery, sweet and crunchy caramel corn would always be gone within days of her making it – but this recipe is so simple, it never took long to make up another batch.

If you are new here, I love to bake just as much as my mother and this homemade caramel corn recipe was a traditional fall treat I decided to carry on with my own family.

Today I am going to show you the recipe, and I am going to try to tweak it a little bit and try something new. I am going to replace the corn syrup with raw honey and see how it tastes and if we notice a difference!

I am also excited to be using these beautiful wooden utensils from Avocrafts. Avocrafts is a United States based company and their utensils are made out of 100% natural teak wood, so you won’t have to worry about toxic microplastics leaching onto your food when cooking!

These beautiful wooden utensils have much softer edges so they won’t scratch/damage your cookware. They’re also durable and heatproof – and if you watch the YouTube video, you can see just how well they worked for me while making this homemade caramel corn recipe.

Jump to Recipe

To start, I pop about 6 quarts of popcorn in my air-popper. You can pop the popcorn any way you wish, for me it’s just easier to do it this way! I removed any un-popped kernels and set it aside.

I then preheat my oven to 250 degrees and gather all of the ingredients. This simple homemade caramel corn recipe just calls for popcorn, 2 cups of brown sugar, 2 sticks of butter, raw honey, 1 tsp. of vanilla, and 1/2 tsp. of baking soda.

Then I add 2 sticks of butter into a saucepan and melt them over medium heat.

Once the butter is melted, I add in the brown sugar and the honey and stir everything together. Once it’s all melted together, bring all the ingredients to a rolling boil for five minutes. Be sure to watch your timer.

Once these ingredients have boiled for five minutes, shut off the heat, and then add the baking soda and vanilla.

Adding the baking soda will make the caramel a beautiful lighter color and cause it to foam up a bit.  This is exactly what you want for your mixture before adding it to the popcorn.

Give all these ingredients another stir and pour this mixture over your popcorn. Stir the popcorn and mixture well and try to make sure all the popcorn is covered with your homemade caramel sauce.

For the next step, many prefer to bake their caramel corn on a large cookie sheet, however I prefer a large roaster. The deeper roaster lets me stir everything evenly and holds all of the popcorn very well.

The caramel corn will need to be mixed every 15 minutes while baking, so having your caramel corn is a deep roaster is ideal for stirring.

These Avocraft spoons worked so well mixing everything together and their smooth texture washed off so easily as well!

I bake my homemade caramel corn for an hour total, and like I said above stir it every 15 minutes. Once the hour is up, you are finished and the caramel corn is done!

I usually allow mine to cool a bit before I transfer it all to a beautiful glass jar to display in my kitchen just like my mom did growing up.

As I said, I tweaked this recipe to avoid corn syrup and used raw honey. I can’t even tell a difference! It tastes delicious and I will for sure be doing this from now on!

Isn’t this recipe so simple? I hope you are able to try it with your own family and even possibly add it into your own fall traditions!

The smell of this simple & delicious homemade caramel corn fills our house and never lasts very long once I make it. It is such a fun treat for my husband and boys and thankfully simple enough to make more once I need to! Let me know in the comments if you try this recipe yourself!

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