Swallow the Evidence: Halloween Evidence Bag Popcorn!

Have fun this Halloween with this cute way to serve popcorn! While it looks gruesome and bloody, the popcorn is a delicious raspberry flavoured salted caramel popcorn with a wonderful crunch. You may never buy caramel popcorn again after seeing how easy it is to make (and how easy it is to make grisly).

While the popcorn is super easy to make, the evidence bags took a little longer. I looked up places that sold actual evidence bags but they only sold them in lots of hundreds. And considering I now have just under 1,000 pie tins in our very small apartment the last thing I needed was a surplus of evidence bags so I decided to make my own.

I'm one of the least crafty people ever but I went to a craft store and bought lots of brown paper bags, removed the handles, cut out windows and taped a clear window panel. Then I went to the printers and asked them to print out evidence labels. After that I was almost too exhausted to make the popcorn!

It's been a very busy and exhausting couple of weeks with Halloween and dealing with my seafood allergy. I had an assignment that my allergist gave me the other day priot to my test. The normal sort of food allergy test involves testing around six seafood items. But to me that wasn't enough, I needed to know exactly what I am allergic to so I don't cut out something that I don't need to. I needed a very comprehensive test of all of the seafood.

So my allergist doctor gave me a task. I had to procure slivers of lots of different types of seafood. I have yet to meet her but she seems to have a very dry sense of humour. She gave me a list of seafood to buy that we could test. But she really made me laugh when she gave me a suggestion for buying everything.

"Ask for one raw prawn. When they look at you weirdly for asking for one prawn just say you are not very hungry," she said. I had to laugh because it sounded rather unbelievable especially since I was buying so much seafood in every variety. By then I decided that I would just explain about my allergy test. The other alternative was for them to think I was a weird eater that was buying seafood that needed to be put straight into labelled ziplock bags with absolutely no cross contamination. Yup, a total food weirdo.

But then again they haven't seen the way I snack. Like I love bloody popcorn served out of evidence bags! I swear it tastes better that way!

So tell me Dear Reader, do you think presentation affects the way a food tastes? Have you ever had to do the same for an allergy? Would you say you weren't hungry or would you explain about your allergy test?

Evidence Bag Popcorn

An Original Recipe by Lorraine Elliott

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Cooking time: 10 minutes plus 1 hour

• 1/4 cup popcorn kernels
• 3/4 cup caster or superfine sugar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 30g/1oz. butter
• Red food colouring
• Raspberry flavouring
• 3 tablespoons crushed freeze dried raspberries
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 120C/248F. Line a baking tray with parchment. Pop the popcorn kernels in a brown paper bag for 2 minutes on high (make sure it doesn't burn).

Step 2 - Bring the sugar, honey, butter and colouring to a boil (you don't need to add any water). Simmer and heat until it gets to 140C/284F and then add flavouring. Add the popped popcorn into the pot and coat well.

Step 3 - Spread out on the prepared tray and sprinkle with freeze dried raspberries. Bake for 1 hour to dry out.