Caramel Sauce

From Simply Recipes

I've always been scared of candy making. I kept hearing horror stories -- keep children and pets away, wear oven mitts, boiling sugar is much hotter than boiling water. It's enough to have kept me away for this long! But when I received my recipe for the October/November WC Nesties recipe exchange, I thought that caramel sauce would be the perfect accompaniment for it. So here goes!

Ingredients:

• 1 c. sugar
• 1/4 c. water (only if needed -- I needed it)
• 6 Tbsp. butter, cut into chunks
• 1/2 c. cream

Directions:

• Have the recipe really handy. I was so nervous about messing it up and burning the house down/my hands/my pup that I needed to have the recipe right in front of my face, taped to my microwave.

• Elise says that you should have all of the ingredients out and ready to go before you start cooking. I totally agree. This was a lifesaver.

• Add the sugar to a pan with high sides and turn the heat to high. Elise cautioned that the mixture would bubble up when you added the cream, but I was nervous so instead of using a pan with not so high sides, I used a pot. It didn't have as much surface area, but better safe than burned, right?
• Elise also cautioned that if you don't have a heavy-bottomed pan, the sugar may burn. Since we haven't broked out our All Clad wedding presents yet, to prevent this, I added 1/4 c. water to the sugar.

Sugar + water.

• After about 2 minutes, the sugar will start to melt. At this point, start stirring! Whisk, whisk, whisk!
• Once you start to see the sugar boiling, you can stop stirring and just let it do it's thing. I swirled it around in the pot a bit to prevent it from sticking to the bottom and burning.

• After about 5 minutes, the sugar starts to carmelize and it'll start turning brown. Add the butter at this point.

I waited until it became a bit more evenly brown than this to add the butter.

• Whisk the butter into the sugar.
• After the butter is fully incorporated, take the pan off of the heat and count to 3.
• After 3 seconds have elapsed (1 mississippi, 2 mississippi, 3 mississippi), slowly add the cream. Just like Elise said, it does bubble up. I had the whisk in my right hand and poured the cream with my left. It worked pretty well that way.
• Once the cream is completely incorporated, it'll look like this:

Back away. Resist all attempts to stick your finger in there to taste. It's really hot.

• Once it cooled down, I stuck it in a squirt bottle to attempt to be somewhat like Bobby Flay and make artful sauce designs on my plates. Oh, Bobby, you're my hero.

Verdict:
It was surprisingly easy! I didn't think it was so easy to make candy-esque things, especially for a worriwart like me! And it tasted just like caramel sauce. =) We put it on vanilla ice cream and apple confit last night, but we still have a ton leftover, so I'm bringing it in to work for a coworker's birthday party tomorrow. Thanks, Elise, for helping me conquer my fears of candy making!