I love caramel apples and think the various candy bar coated ones are delicious! I thought I'd try it out and see how it goes. What's nice about making candy bar caramel apples at home is you can use any candy bar you want and use up old Halloween candy if you have a lot of little bars leftover. For these examples, I used Twix and M&M but you can use any kinds. Chocolate bars will probably turn out the best though.

Instructable 384

Supplies

Ingredients:

Apples
Caramels* + a few Mini Marshmallows + a little water, I use about 7 caramels per apple a few mini marshmallows, and about 1 tsp of water. You can increase this for however many apples you are doing.
Candy of choice
I used 1.5 full sized Twix bars for 1 apple and I feel 1 Twix was all that was really necessarily for my apple size. If you were to have a very large apple, you could consider prepping more candy for it.

Supplies:

Microwave safe bowls
Knives
Popsicle Stick or Cookie Pop Sticks for the apples
Wax Paper - to put the apples on while they are firming up, they'll still stick, but it shouldn't be as bad as a plate

*I'm doing super easy microwave caramels to make individual apples. You can of course use your favorite caramel recipe if you have one as long as it is one that will firm up on the apple.

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Step 1: Apple Prep

Start by prepping your apples. As I've shown in previous caramel apple tutorials, you can start by boiling water and dropping your apples in for about 10 seconds to warm up the wax that coats most store bought apples to help with the caramel sticking to them.

Stick a popsicle stick in them to make the process of making these easier. Gives you something to hold.

One thing to note is I've noticed that if you use a cold apple from the fridge the caramel seems to harden faster which can be good if you have a heavy coating or bad if you don't have enough time to coat it before it hards.

Step 2: Candy Prep

Before making the apples, you'll need to chop the candy.

I recommend chopping it up fairly small. The first time, I just did chunks and as you can see in the last image, that doesn't really work. Smaller is better here.

Putting this in a bowl will make it easier to coat your apple when its ready.

For my M&M one I left them alone, but honestly, if I were to do an M&M apple again, I'd probably smash them up first. Doesn't look as good, but I had WAY too many M&Ms on mine for the size of the apple, and they were so heavy they were just dripping off the apple which resulted in me adding too many.

Step 3: Caramel Coating the Apple

As long as your apple and coating are ready, you can now melt the caramel. I use about 7 of these caramels per apple if it's small to medium in size.

Make sure to add some water in with the caramel. You don't want too much or it will be too runny or to little or it will harden rock hard. If you have them, throw in some mini marshmallows for extra stickiness.

It only took about two times at 30 seconds to melt this small amount.

I like to use a knife rather than a spoon here as I feel the caramel just gets caught in the bowl of the spoon and with a knife you can both stir up the caramel and spread it over the apple.

Step 4: M&M Version

M&M is done much the same way, but I found they were pretty heavy and everything wanted to slide off the apple. To try to help with this you could try using a cold apple. This will help the caramel harden up faster and hopefully get those M&Ms staying in place. Or you could mash up the candy a bit first so it isn't as thick and heavy on the apple.

Step 5: Chocolate Coating/Drizzle

For a little something extra, you can drizzle some chocolate on top of the apple. The candy bars already have chocolate, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to have a little more!

Step 6: Cut and Enjoy

I highly recommend cutting and eating these. I feel like biting right off the apple especially with so much coating on it like this, can't be good for your teeth.