A Cracker Jack of a Snack!

Hey, Cracker Jacks! Hope you all had a great July 4th! We enjoyed several goodies for the holiday including the all-American snack of Cracker Jacks! I made a batch for the 4th and then a second batch for my supper club last night. We meet every other week for dinner and visiting with a theme for the meal. This week’s theme was ballpark food! How fun! I signed up for Conecuh sausage dogs with homemade mustard sauce. There is also a sign up each time for someone to bring a takeaway treat for everyone to leave with. I thought the Cracker Jacks would make a fun takeaway treat so I signed up for that too!

Homemade Cracker Jacks

Ingredients:

16 cups popped corn

1 cup salted butter

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup light brown sugar

1/2 cup light corn syrup

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups roasted salted peanuts

(You can use the traditional redskin peanuts, but I like the roasted salted.)

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees. Place popcorn in a large bowl and set aside. Melt the butter in saucepan on the stove. Once melted, stir in the brown sugars and syrup.

Keep stirring until it starts to boil and remove from heat. Whisk in the vanilla and baking soda.

Pour the sauce over the popcorn being careful not to burn yourself. Stir into the popcorn until well-coated.

Stir in the peanuts quickly while the sauce is still warm.

I added red, white, and blue sprinkles to dress it up for the 4th!

Spread the mixture between two large sprayed baking pans. Mine pictured below are 11×15.

Place in the oven and bake for 1 hour, taking them out of the oven every 15 minutes to stir and then return to the oven.

Let the Cracker Jacks cool in the pans.

Once cooled, I packaged them in these gold paper boats from Hobby Lobby. They each held 1 cup of Cracker Jacks. Perfect!

I slipped each boat into some plastic party bags I had on hand and tied them off with patriotic ribbon. So cute!

This is a super easy ballpark snack that’s sure to hit a home run with all ages!