Fall caramels
make your own or just melt some down for fondue
caramel w Asian pears & apple slices
Whether you’re making things easy on yourself this fall and just melting caramels and adding cream in a slow cooker, or making your own caramel for all your apple, pear, pretzel, chocolate, pie, ice cream, cake and cookie drizzling needs, there’s nothing that really says fall like homemade caramel.
If you’re planning on making it yourself, we’re surprised to report that it’s actually pretty simple, though we admit, a little tricky. It occurred to us this is a good recipe to understand and be able to make adaptations for, because caramel sauce is a sweets game changer. We learned that though it doesn’t look like it will become caramel 99% of the time, it will, and to keep a close eye on it and cook just long enough. Setting a timer helps.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup milk (or cream, or any mixture of the two. we just happened to have almond milk and wondered if that would work, it did)
1 cup of sugar
1 tablespoon butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
big pinch of sea salt
ice or ice cold water
INSTRUCTIONS
Prepare a contraption that is bigger than your saucepan with ice water.
Combine ingredients in a saucepan. Cook on medium-low heat, stirring consistently, until it looks like caramel and not a second longer! Should take about exactly 10 minutes and you’ll see all the bubbles have disappeared.
Quickly transfer the pot to your ice water bath to stop the caramel from continuing to cook! Once the pot cools off, get it into the fridge to finish cooling down.
Straight off the stove, the caramel will be very, very, very hot!!! Be sure not to try it before it cools down unless you want to burn your mouth like we did.