Today I tried to make salted caramels! Yum! I found this great recipe on
America's Test Kitchen. The picture looked like just what I was looking for....I wanted to do a homemade gift for Joslyn's teacher to wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week.
It looks like it will be an epic fail!!!
Here are some pictures from my process:
This is the vanilla bean that I massacred to get the wonderfully rich scented vanilla "caviar"! Needless to say I did not get a picture of the process...the seeds were flying everywhere.
This is the creamy foam, just before I took it off the heat.
Here is the beginning of the boiling sugar, water, corn syrup mixture.
This the part where I was supposed to watch and not look away. The part that every recipe cautions you to not do anything else. Instead I was taking pictures....and trying to remember what "amber colored" actually would look like!
This color happened almost immediately and of course, as I was letting it sit to pour the cream mixture...this was smelling a bit like I had burned it!
I scraped out the mixture into my vintage casserole dish. My mantra at this point was "It's supposed to look like this....it's supposed to smell like this, Right?!?
Well after letting my ugly caramels (that smelled like smoke) cool for 2 hours...it was gooey to the touch and tasted just as bad as it smelled.
The moral of the story is; don't take pictures while cooking sugar, be sure to have a candy thermometer and not one that registers only to 225 degrees and failures lead to successes...Right?
