EASY soft caramels you can whip up in about 15 minutes. You don’t need a candy thermometer to make these caramels and they literally melt in your mouth!
This recipe is the bane of my baking existence. Not because I can’t make it, oh no. If I couldn’t make it I would have tried it once, maybe twice, made sad sounds at it being beyond me, deleted the bookmark, and moved on.
No, I can make it. In fact, I make it very well. My wife loves it. And there’s where the problem starts.
My wife loves it, so she asks me to make it for her. She knows it’s an annoying recipe for me, though, so she only asks for it for special occasions. You know, the type of things I can’t say no to or I’m a dick.
Melting the butter and sugar together is fine, and so is adding the corn syrup and sweetened condensed milk. Up until that point everything’s normal.
Then the ten minute timer starts for the simmering. And this stuff needs to be babysat, I can’t just let it go. I have to stare at it and stir it and watch it taunt me.
2 minutes into simmering it starts to smell like macaroni and cheese. I can’t explain it. It just does. And this smell persists the whole time.
4 minutes in and the butter separates from the rest of it. You don’t realize how much butter 3/4ths a cup is until it’s a giant puddle on top of sweet goo in a pot.
6 minutes in and it starts to foam. I think it’s the butter again, but I’m not entirely sure. It just foams.
At 10 minutes this shit finally starts to change color. It’s been off-white this whole goddamn time and now it’s finally starting to look like caramel. But not enough.
So it has to go another 5 minutes until it’s at the consistency and color I want.
And this whole time, ever since the smells-like-mac-and-cheese stage, I’ve been convinced I made it wrong. No matter how many times I’ve made it before, this time I know this batch is fubar. It has to be. Look at it! It’s horrifying!
But eventually the butter works back in, and it looks ok, and it gets poured into a pan to cool, and I think “Maybe this batch will be awful and my wife will hate it and I’ll never have to make it again. Maybe this is the last time, since I know it has to be wrong.”
But it isn’t. It never is. It’s fine. It’s great. My wife loves it.
And, eventually, I have to make it again.
