Make a Crunchy Frosty

If, by some holiday miracle, you end up with a few left over, turn them into windowsill or table decorations. They make cute party favors or little gifts for the neighborhood kids, too. Click here to download a printable version of the Popcorn Snowmen recipe. It will be saved to your hard drive as "cookbook_crunchsnow.pdf". Your browser needs to be running the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in to view and print this file. Click here to download and install the free plug-in.

Ingredients

15 cups popped popcorn
1 stick of butter or margarine
2 10-ounce packages marshmallows
Pretzel sticks
Raisins
Candy corn
Mini jawbreakers
Gumdrops or red hots
Fruit leather

Directions

Put the popcorn in your largest mixing bowl. Set it aside for now.

Next, melt the butter or margarine in a nonstick saucepan over medium-low heat. Then, add all the marshmallows, stirring continually with a wooden spoon until they're completely melted.

Pour the mixture over the popcorn and stir to coat evenly. As soon as the marshmallow mixture is cool enough to touch, rub a little margarine on your hands and start making popcorn balls.

Each popcorn requires about 1 cup of popcorn--less for the head of the snowman, more for the base.

Build and decorate your snowmen on a sheet of waxed paper. For each snowman, stack 3 popcorn balls on top of each other.

Push pretzel stick arms into the sides of the middle popcorn ball. Add raisins for eyes and a candy corn nose.

Arrange a row of mini jawbreakers into a broad grin. For buttons on the snowman's chest, use gumdrops or red hots.

TIP: If your popcorn balls aren't sticky enough to hold the decorations, mix up a small batch of stiff white icing and use it to glue the candy in place. To make the icing, add water--a few drops at a time--to 1/4 cup confectioners' sugar and stir until smooth.

For a scarf, cut strips of fruit leather long enough to wrap about the snowman's "neck" and fringe the ends.