Quick, easy dark chocolate popcorn

Chocolate + salty stuff = LOVE. In your tummy, at least.

Fashionable restaurants are putting bacon into chocolate desserts. People have been pairing liquidy forms of chocolate with pretzels, potato chips and popcorn for a long time. But once upon a time, I was hungry for something both sweet and salty, and I didn’t have any liquid form chocolate in my place, and I was way too lazy to drive out and get some. What to do?

Dark Chocolate Popcorn

You’ll need:

• Microwaveable popcorn without any flavoring – just plain popcorn.
• Pure cocoa powder (the kind that’s bitter until you add something to sweeten it)
• Sugar, xylitol, or probably Splenda or any number of artificial sweeteners in powder form (as long as they’re capable of sticking to something, they’ll work).
• A bag to shake the popcorn and powders in together. It should be noticeably bigger than the microwave popcorn bag, but not huge.

Here’s what you do:

1. Pop the popcorn.
2. Put the cocoa powder and sweetener into a bowl and stir them together.

3. Pour the blended powders into your bag.

4. Once the popcorn is popped, you want to transfer it as quickly as you can into the bag of powder, so you don’t lose much heat or steam. But you also need to pour the popcorn in stages, shaking the bag a little with each stage, so you’re covering the popcorn in powder somewhat as you go. Once all the popcorn is in, you close the bag and shake, baby, shake!

6. Eat it!

The taste is very dark chocolate, sweet, and salty. The texture is not powdery, or at least not in a way that tickles your throat. It may take a little bit of getting used to, but it gets addictive after a few bites.