Sara's Caramels

Last night I made caramels for Sara, my brother's lovely wife. Her birthday is the day before mine and we did the big family celebration tonight at my mom and dad's house. The only candy I'd made before this was a massive batch of bourbon balls at Christmas, but those don't really count because bourbon balls are as much cookie as they are candy. 

 I found the recipe that I based Sara's Caramels on at Coconut and Lime, Rachel Rappaport's wonderful food blog. Between that and the recipe/tutorial posted by the amazing Helen at Tartelette, I was ready to go. So here is the result.

They might not look terribly pretty, but don't let my sad presentation fool you - these are some darn good caramels, and I don't even really like caramels. So, without further ado, the recipe for Sara's Caramels!

Ingredients:

1 cup heavy cream

5 tbs. butter, cut in

to pieces

1 tsp. sea salt

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1/4 dark rum

1 tbs. vanilla extract

Process:

1. Heavily grease an 8x8 inch pyrex pan with lots of butter - this is really important if you want to get the caramels out of the pan once they've cooled.

2. Bring cream, butter and salt to a boil in a small saucepan. Whisk occasionally so that the salt dissolves. Once the cream, butter and salt have come to a healthy boil, take off heat and set aside. 

3. In a separate saucepan, cook the rum, corn syrup, vanilla and sugar, stirring often to dissolve the sugar. At first it will look like nothing's happening, but all of a sudden the sugar wi

ll liquify. This is what you want. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook until it's light go

lden caramel. 

4. Slowly pour in the cream mixture, whisking slowly and constantly. Set to a steady simmer and cook until the candy thermometer reads 245 degrees (soft-ball stage). 

* This will take awhile, but don't leave it alone - it will go from underdone to burnt in no time at all. You should also stir it often, but not constantly. 

5. Once the caramel reaches 245 degrees, pour it into the greased pan and set the pan on a stable wire rack. Let it cool and set for at least 3 hours. Don't refriderate, just leave it at cool room temperature. 

6. Remove the caramel from the pan (it helps to wedge the sides loose first) and put it on wax paper. Wrap it up in wax paper until you're ready to cut it. 

7. Cut it into whatever sized pieces you like, wrap each piece in wax paper for storage (this is important because the caramel pieces will mush into each other if given the chance) and store at cool room temperature until you noshed through the whole lot. They'll keep indefinitely out of the fridge because they're pretty much nothing but sugar... unless ants get them and then all bets are off :-)