Caramel Fail

I was making those ever-so-popular fleur de sel caramels today when I learned that maybe one should do the dishes either before, or after the candy making. It's been a while since I made real candy, so I excuse the forgetfulness. As a result of my negligence, I let it boil 5 or so degrees higher than the recipe called for. Oops. It set up quicker than the recommended two hours, and did not have that lovely, creamy-sticky-soft mouth-feel. What happened instead was that the caramels turned into a lovely caramel-toffee cross. Initially, it feels like toffee, but then you chew it a bit and it becomes sticky and soft, but not like a real caramel. Delicious, but not what I wanted*.

I am learning from the fail in three ways:

1) Watch the pot, not the cleaning
2) In case of a fail of #1, set the alarm on the candy thermometer
3) On fail days, open a can of homemade pasta sauce instead of chancing ruining dinner (this is preemptive learning since I have not ruined dinner yet, by choosing to use the stuff I canned instead of "real" cooking)

*Which goes to show that the people at Gourmet are geniuses. Obviously, if they weren't, total screw ups w/ their recipes wouldn't still taste good.

Comments

  1. Mary Bergfeld8:37 PM

    Next time!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Astra Libris3:52 PM

    Your caramel adventure sounds like it yielded scrumptious results! I love when a recipe turns out something unexpected - perhaps you were meant to be distracted by the dishes! :-)

    Toooo funny about our cats!! We do seem to have parallel lives quite often, don't we? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Darius T. Williams10:10 AM

    LOL - hilarious. But yea, you'll knock 'em dead on the next go around - lol.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Allie8:52 PM

    Mary,

    Absolutely! I'm very happy with the way they came out though, so even though I didn't get what I was looking for, I found something else because of the mistake!

    Astra,

    It's really good. I must've been meant to. P has asked me to replicate the error, but to sprinkle on more salt. :)

    We really do have parallel lives a lot of the time. It's really strange, but also cool.

    Darius,

    For sure! But now I have to make them properly, and the mistake way!

    ReplyDelete

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