sticky pinteractivity

first and foremost: a very happy birthday to my dear husband!  hope it's a wonderful day and full of lots of love and fun!  

so, okay.  this week's pinteractivity involves this stuff:

i'd seen this post for salted caramel popcorn and pinned it immediately.  and then i couldn't stop thinking about it.  but with the teen leaving for a week at her dad's, i wasn't sure if anyone else would eat it besides me.  the hub isn't a huge fan of sweet and savory mixed together, and MIL can't eat popcorn.

so, of course, i had the brilliant idea of substituting rice chex instead.  it's crunchy and folks use it all the time for stuff like this, right?  hell yes!  so i got started on the caramel, which was a simple mix of sugar, water, and sea salt.  i love recipes that require me to do...well, pretty much absolutely nothing.

i poured the pretzel sticks into my big measuring cup, used my hands to squish 'em into smaller pieces, and mixed it with the rice chex.

since i had time to kill with that caramel sauce bubbling away on the stove, i pre-measured out everything else i needed.

and i decided to bust out the good stuff.

it took about 13 minutes total before the sauce was finally the right color.

but because i love adding completely unnatural shades to food (please see my st. patrick's day breakfast and the bean's rainbow-brite party if you need examples), i added a drop of pink to it as i stirred the marshmallows in.

after mixing it into the cereal and pretzels, i added a bag of plain m&ms and spread it all out on some wax paper to cool off.  just for good measure, i sprinkled more of that sea salt on top to make it extra delicious.

it seems that i've learned the hard way that i should've used probably 1.5 times the chex cereal as the popcorn called for in the recipe.  even after it was completely cool, the snack was still super sticky.

that's okay, though.  everyone in the house seems to be addicted to it, and it may very well be gone before i can even scrape it off of the wax paper and put it in a bowl.  and that, my friends, is a definite sign of success.