by Kelly J. Larson

Popcorn balls remind me of Halloween when I was a little girl in the late 1960s in Moore, Oklahoma, and my mom dressed up as a scary witch with a green face and long nose, wearing all black. It was so fun to see my mom get so into the season.

She made really awesome popcorn balls, but I never got her recipe and she hasn’t made them in decades.

My son’s birth grandmother, Grandma Traci, shared her late friend’s recipe for popcorn balls with the condition that her friend’s name stays with it. So today on Halloween, I made Helen Fox’s Popcorn Balls for the first time, and they are wonderful and worth passing on for her legacy. I made it as her recipe states with very slight changes. (I used microwave popcorn that is salted, so I decreased the salt slightly.)

Helen Fox’s Popcorn Balls

• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup light corn syrup
• 1/3 cup water
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 bags microwave popcorn (3 to 4 quarts)

Cook the popcorn, remove unpopped kernels. Butter the bottom of a very large bowl and add the popped corn.

On medium heat, cook sugar, corn syrup, water, butter and salt, stirring until sugar is dissolved. Add thermometer and don’t stir until the mixture reaches softball stage, 240 degrees Fahrenheit. Turn off heat, then stir in vanilla. Pour over popcorn, evenly coating the bowlful.

With buttered hands, shape a handful of popcorn to form about 20 to 22 popcorn balls. Set each formed popcorn ball onto a Silpat sheet until finished.

I double the recipe, no problems.