I discovered why when you google “homemade caramels: Giverslog’s failproof caramel recipe came up! It really did turn out to be pretty failproof. Recently I discovered the site is down, so the ingredients are:

  • 1 cup butter, unsalted
  • 1 cup light corn syrup (11.5 oz)
  • 1 14-oz. can sweetened condensed milk (or substitute two cups half and half or light cream, I almost always use sweetened condensed milk b/c makes for shorter cooking time)
  • 2 1/4 cup brown sugar (14.5 oz.), white sugar is also okay, but I prefer brown
  • 1 tsp. vanilla

Equipment:
candy thermometer
heavy, 3-qt. sauce pan, or 6-qt. if doubling the recipe, which I always do (having a heavy pan is important, if your pan is too thin it can heat the caramel unevenly and make it separate)
parchment paper (how I love parchment paper, i’ve never found anything that sticks to this stuff)
8×8 or 9×9 pan (or large jelly-roll cookie sheet if doubling recipe)
wax paper for wrapping caramels

My fear of making a hot molten sugary disaster caused me to overprepare a bit, but after I did it the first time, by 4 batches later I was still using my same technique. The first thing I did was gather all of my ingredients and measured them out, and placed them next to the pan.

I melted the butter on low heat stirring the whole time.

After the butter was melted I added the pre-measured brown sugar a few spoonfuls at a time in the center of the pan. While I was adding the sugar I turned the heat up to medium low.

I added the sweetened condensed milk and the Karo syrup stirring constantly on medium low heat.

I followed the directions on slowly turning up the heat. I stirred constantly and gradually raised the heat to medium high and got the caramel to a boil. I attached the thermometer and gradually turned the heat back down to medium keeping the caramel at a boil.

Giverslog suggests that you check your thermometer in boiling water, that test had my thermometer showing a 10 degree difference, but the marks on the thermometer for soft ball and hard ball turned out to be about right (I live at a very high elevation, which I guess really messes all of that up). What I ended up doing was testing the homemade caramel regularly in a bowl of cold water because I was downright nervous about messing it up.

Once I got the caramel to a good consistency between the soft ball and hard ball stage I added the vanilla and poured it into a buttered dish (I didn’t have contact paper, so I opted for the buttered route, nothing got stuck so it worked great). I covered the caramel in chopped almonds (for this batch I opted to have the almonds on the outside rather than mixed in, I also did a few batches with almonds mixed in).

I let the caramel sit for a couple of hours and then pulled it out of the pan and placed on top of wax paper on a cutting board and let it sit covered with more wax paper overnight. I cut it with a pizza cutter and wrapped in wax paper.

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