The day Lori (of Stuff I Ate) came to my house with homemade salted caramels, I knew my life had changed. These were just SO fantastic. I can’t believe it took me nearly 6 months to make them for myself. But make them I did! (Her post about it is here, and the recipe is here)
Though not without some, as usual, thermometer troubles. I tried my new one, but it stopped moving after a bit, so I added the other 2 (which have shown various levels of accuracy) figuring that I would hopefully find 2 numbers that matched.
Since I didn’t have temperature to rely on, I used the method of cold water drop for caramel. In this method, you drop a bit of the caramel into cold water to see if it’s done.
You can then scoop it up and test for texture. I stopped the cooking when it was forming balls that didn’t spread out once formed and tasted delicious (ok… to be honest… I tasted many iterations along the way and they were all delicious). They definitely hardened quite a bit from here, but the texture was great.
The first thing I did was fill my peanut butter cup molds up about halfway with the caramel, then top it with chocolate, and sprinkle on some sea salt. This was DELICIOUS!
I then took the rest and put it into a silicon baking mold.
I should have put it into a smaller one, since it got quite thin, but it still tasted great.
And then I topped it with sea salt.
And then cut it into pieces and, not having wax paper at the time, wrapped it in foil
They made cute little caramel pillows.
This recipe was delicious, but I do not recommend making them in the dead of a 100 degree heat wave. Half of them melted together before I even got them out of the mold. I definitely had to keep them in the fridge and each one MUST be individually wrapped or else it melts into one big (delicious) ball of salted caramel.
I would say go make them NOW, but the heat wave is upon us again… so give it a few weeks and then GO! Make them!
Tags: candy, candy thermometer, candymaking, homemade caramels, how to know when caramel is ready, salted caramels
Yay!! My NEW thermometer broke as I made mine, and they came out okay! LOVE the peanut butter cup idea! These are so delicious that I haven’t dared make them since the last time. Maybe we’ll do a caramel making-palooza in the fall! NOM NOM!
Simply….yum!