Tutorial Tuesday: Chewy Cobweb Bars

This week's tutorial is totally ad lib. I made it up. Like...two hours ago...

don't worry, i've tasted the results and i'm happy to report that they are tutorial worthy :-o

However..."Chewy Cobweb Bars" are a kind of lame name so feel free to come up with a better recipe title after perusing the tutorial!

What you need:

• 3 cups pretzels
• 6 cups Chex Mix (or your choosing of squared cereal)
• 2 cups peanuts (i used lightly salted)
• 1 bag candy corn (mine was 22 oz.) RESERVE 1/2 cup!
  
• 1 bag (mine was 10.5 oz) mini-marshmallows
• 4 tbl butter
• Special note: i thought about adding chocolate chips and raisins but, after tasting the finished product, i think it would have been WAY too sweet. But feel free to mix, match, subtract, and add your own favorite goodies!

Measure out your LARGE dry ingredients--the pretzels and the cereal

You want to mix the same weight/shape ingredients together so that they are more evenly distributed. My theory. My blog...if you think that is rubbish, let me know because, again, this recipe is all ad-lib today!

Mix thoroughly:

Put the the peanuts on top (now, if we were going to go with the same theory of mixing like ingredients, i suppose i should have followed through and pre-mixed the peanuts and candy corn. Oh well):

IMPORTANT: Measure out 1/2 cup of candy corn, set aside

then add the rest of the candy corn and mix thoroughly again:

Melt your butter:

While that is melting, prep your pan. i didn't have any baking spray so I just used a bit of butter:

Now for the crazy part:



YUP

Add the 1/2 cup of candy corn to the butter mixture and stir it over LOW heat.

Now...I'm talking really low heat. Sugar burns. We want happy sugar not fired up sugar. LOW temperature=Happy Sugar!

It took my candy corn about 4 minutes of mixing to finally start to look like this (i must admit, i had my doubts that this tutorial was ever going to go live...but, melt it did!)

Add HALF the bag of marshmallows to the mixture, still over LOW heat. You don't want to overwhelm the candy so just add a bit at a time. Stir stir stir:

Once the first half of the marshmallows is melted, add the remaining marshmallows and continue stirring over LOW heat:

Pretty soon it will look like this:

And then, finally, this is what your "corn" syrup (get it!?!?) should look like after all the marshmallows have been added and melted:

i think it is a really pretty light orange if I do say so myself!

Pour the syrupy mixture quickly into the bowl of prepared dry ingredients. I didn't think that my dry ingredients would all fit in the pot so I used the pouring method. I might change this method next time but not too much sugary goodness was wasted so it wasn't a bad thing.

Mix mix mix mix mix. You will get sticky. If you have kids that are old enough, butter their hands and let them go to town. It gives a whole new meeting to batter tasting--just licking straight off your "hand"y utensils (oh i'm so full of puns today!)

Smoosh the finished goodness into your prepared pan. The smooshing part is how I came up with the name for the recipe (but, don't forget, i'm open to new names!!!). When you are mixing and smooshing, the marshmallow corn syrup looks like an orange cobweb!

Once cooled, cut into squares or halloween shapes or whatever you fancy and serve!

YUM!

Let me know if you try this crazy ad-lib recipe and/or if you have a new name for it!