Caramel-Peanut-Chocolate-Snickers Apples

You heard right. You better sit down and get your paper bag for when you start hyperventilating. My best friend in the world, Kate, made the mistake of sending me the link to this blog, expecting me to have the will-power to not rush straight out to the grocery store to buy all the ingredients. (For your information, I managed to wait about 4 days.)


Being the wise person I am, whenever I have recipes that I want to try but have such a high fat content in them it would make deep-fry-everything Southern women stagger a little bit, I have friends over to SHARE it with.


This is one of those "recipes".


Except it's not so much a recipe, as a "Let's Dip Apples in EVERYTHING YUMMY AND DELICIOUS YOU CAN FIND" event. The recipe, found here, is dubbed "Change-Your-Life-Caramel Apples" by it's amazing creator (sadly, this was not my idea). And any recipe with the phrase "sweet sassy-molassy" in it is guaranteed to pique my interest.


We basically just took the following ingredients and sloshed the apples around in them. Well, there was a bit of organization. But not really. Our ingredients and process differ a little bit than the original recipe, which is the beauty of caramel apples. You can do what you want with them.

Ingredients:

• 24 Granny Smith apples (we used full-size, not the smaller ones, and it still worked pretty well)
• 5 bags of caramels (this made more than enough for the full-size apples - we had extra that unfortunately we had to dump over fresh popcorn to keep it from going to waste)
• 3 bags of Nestle chocolate chunks (once again, we had a little extra. But we also didn't chocolate-ize every apple, and we managed to keep it from going to waste by mixing the rest over pretzels. Hmm.)
• 1 22.5 oz bag of mini-Snickers
• 1 16oz jar of honey-roasted peanuts
• craft sticks, or something to help with the apple-dipping

Directions:

• I chopped up my peanuts and my Snickers bars in the food processor first, that way when the girls arrived there was a little prep as possible.
• The creator of the recipe recommends freezing the Snickers bars before chopping them, which I second. It chops them up into much finer pieces.
• Peeling the Snickers and the caramels is definitely a bit time consuming, but many hands make quick work if you decide to save this step for when your friends are around.

Bliss. I mean, finely chopped Snickers bars. I have daydreams about
these sprinkled on top of ice cream, brownies, and cupcakes.

Snickers massacre. It's a good thing they were frozen, or none
of these would have wound up in the food processor.

Wooooo Nelly! Chopped peanuts and chopped
Snickers. You really can't get much
better than that!

• Wash and skewer your apples.
• Add 2 tbsp water per bag of caramels. I wound up adding a little bit more than 1/3 of a cup.
• Melt down your caramel over medium-low heat until it's nice and smooooooth. Also put your chocolate into a double-boiler and work on melting it down.

I have virtually no pictures of the next few steps, because caramel apples are incredibly messy to make. At least when I'm involved. And this was a group of adults making them. So...I apologize, but this will have to be the brief version! Check out the original recipe for more detailed photos.


Dip your apples in caramel, then rolllllll in the peanuts. Once you've rolled in peanuts and the caramel has set a bit, take a spatula and spoon the chocolate over the apples. Chocolate is a little too thick to dip the apples in. Once rolled in chocolate, roll in chopped up Snickers, and then get these puppies into the freezer as soon as possible. If it wasn't obvious enough, all these toppings are a liiittttlllleee bit heavy. 

Believe it or not, this is just the caramel and peanuts.
We've still got a layer to go!

Once they're set (or let's be honest, while they're still melty and gooey), chop up with a sharp knife and ENJOY.  And make sure you share them with a friend. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. You've got a lot of eating to do still!

The only picture I have of the finished product. Whew!

A word of advice - we actually only did about 6 apples with all four toppings on it. As delicious as these are, it's a little bit heavy. Or a lot bit heavy. So we made it even more fun and mixed and matched - some were caramel with peanuts, some were caramel with snickers, and so on. So be creative, and try all sorts of toppings. These are apples...so there's at least some health value no matter what you put on it!


And also - save yourself some trouble. Wash your pans while the caramel is still warm. Or you'll hate yourself later.


Now, go run a mile, because you just gained a pound LOOKING at these things!