Pale Ale Caramels

When I first saw these pale ale and pretzel caramels on Sprinkle Bakes, I immediately bookmarked the recipe.  I found them fascinating, incorporating a beer into a sweet caramel and her photos made my mouth water.  Personally, I dislike beer.  My husband, however, thoroughly enjoys a good beer.  I figured this would be the best of both worlds so I had him save me a few pale ales and gave it a shot.  I originally used the exact recipe from Sprinkle Bake's website, however I had quite a bit of trouble with it.  I ended up over reducing the beer, creating a sticky mess on the bottom of my saucepan.  I also failed to consider how much the caramel would boil, and used too small of a saucepan for the caramels resulting in an even bigger and stickier mess all over my range.  Awesome.  When I finally managed to get the caramels into the pan, they hardened into a solid crystallized blob.  Back to the drawing board. 

I consulted a couple of my cookbooks: Field Guide to Candy and Chocolate and Confections and developed the below recipe.  The caramels turned out soft, buttery, and melt in your mouth good.  Honestly, they do not taste a bit like beer.  In the future, I will probably just stick with vanilla flavoring.  Its easier than reducing the beer.  I opted out of the pretzels that the original recipe called for, because this recipe was a bit of an experiment already. 

Pale Ale Caramels adapted from Chocolate and Confections and Sprinkle Bakes

• 2 cups 20granulated sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 12 oz pale ale, divided
• 24 oz evaporated milk
• 10 oz heavy cream
•  1.5 oz butter (2-3 tablespoons)
• 20 oz Caro syrup
• 1 teaspoon sea salt

Take 1 cup of the pale ale and pour in a medium to largish bowl and stick in the microwave for about 10 minutes or until the ale is reduced to a few tablespoons.  You want to make sure that your bowl is large enough to accommodate the boiling of the beer.  Optionally, you could simmer the beer on the stove unless you are me who starts doing three other things and soon has a burned sticky mess on her hands.  The beeping of the microwave keeps me accountable.  Also, you lessen the chance of caramelizing the beer.

In a large saucepan, combine the sugars, remaining ale, evaporated milk, and cream.  When making caramel, you want to add the sugar to liquid alone to be sure that the sugar fully dissolves.  Bring to a boil.

Once boiling, add the Caro syrup.  This helps to prevent crystallization and gives the caramel chewiness.  Bring the mixture to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.  With caramel, it is better to have a long slow cook to allow the flavors to develop and prevent burning of the milk products.  Once the mixture is up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit, add the butter.

When the temperature reaches 239 degrees Fahrenheit, remove from the stove.  Add the salt and 2 tablespoons of the reduced beer syrup.  Pour into a buttered and tin foiled 9x13 pan.

Allow to set and cut into pieces with a well oiled knife.  Wrap with wax paper or dip in chocolate.  These babies loose their shape so they need to be wrapped.  Also, if it is very humid out like it has been in the Midwest here, don't make these without air conditioning.  They will not set up well. 

So Tricky!

Never have I put so much work into a cupcake.  Seriously.  My baby sister gave me Martha Stewart's Cupcake book for my birthday this past year.  I haven't really had the opportunity to try much out of it, but I flip through it at least once a week.  Those photos really inspire me to want to bake cupcakes all day and all night.  The only trick is, like many of Martha's recipes, they are complicated!

However, this past Sunday I had some time on my hands.  My husband had left for sunny California for business early that morning and I was due at my sister's for lunch and I was to bring dessert.  (I always bring dessert).  I decided on these Chocolate caramel filled mini cupcakes because my husband hates caramel and everyone else who was to be at my sister's loves it.

I did a quick read through of the recipe.  Ok, I had all of the ingredients. Sweet. (I am notorious for missing one or two things.  The concept of en mise seems to be totally lost on me.)  I figured the recipe would be fairly simple.  Chocolate cupcakes, fill them with homemade caramel sause, frost with really awesome chocolate frosting.  No problem.

For starters, they were mini cupcakes.  Which means a recipe makes like forty million cupcakes.  Since there would only be five us at lunch and my mini muffin tin only held 24 cupcakes, I immediately opted to cut the recipe in half.  The yield ended up being 24 mini cupcakes and 3 regular sized cupcakes.  Halving the cake batter was fine and halving the icing was about perfect, however, halving the caramel left me a little short.  But not to worry, that was not my only problem with the caramel sauce...

I followed the directions for making the caramel pretty much to the letter.  I do not like to do this, I prefer to tinker a bit with recipes, but cooking sugar is a tricky business, so I followed the directions.  I cooked the sugar to the recommended 360 degrees.  I was a little concerned because it kept getting darker and darker and darker and then in an instant, black.  Crud!  Well, I tried to salvage it and poured my cream in anyway.  It lightened up a bit, looking more like caramel.  But it smelled like burnt.  I don't know what possessed me but I then proceeded to pour my burnt caramel into my nicely hollowed out cupcakes.  Then I tried one.  Lo and behold, they tasted like chocolate cupcakes filled with burnt.  Gross.  At this point I had already made the frosting and had it on standby and had no time to make anything else.  What did I do, I dug all of the putrid caramel out of my cupcake shells and started over.  This time I only cooked the caramel sauce to 320 degrees.  It might have been a little light, but it tasted good.  In the end, the cupcakes tasted fine, but they had significantly less cupcake then intended.

Tricky but Tasty Chocolate Caramel filled Cupcakes adapted from Martha Stewart

Cupcakes:  yield 24 mini and 3 regular cupcakes
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/8 cup Hershey's cocoa powder
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder (both the soda and powder are reduced from the original recipe, I have an unnatural fear of tasting leavening agents in my baked goods)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/8 cup buttermilk
1 1/2 teaspoons peanut oil
3/8 cup very warm water (to activate the cocoa)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix together dry ingredients and then add the wet ones.  The batter is very runny.  Pour into mini muffin tins.  Bake at 350 degrees for 11-12 minutes.  Allow to cool completely.  Using a paring knife, cut out the middles of the cupcakes to allow room for the caramel.  I found the cupcakes very moist, so I ended up doing a lot of digging.

Caramel Sauce
1 1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
1/2 cup heavy cream (crucial, without it the caramel will get hard in your cupcake)
1 1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Heat sugar, water, and corn syrup together stirring occasionally until mixture comes to a boil.  Allow to boil undisturbed until temperature reaches 320 degrees.  Remove from heat and stir in the cream and sea salt.  Be careful when adding the cream, the hot boiling sugar likes to bubble up furiously when adding the cold cream.

Spoon caramel sauce into the cupcake cavities.  You may have to go back and top off your cupcakes, because the caramel sauce soaks into the cake which tastes awesome but uses a lot of caramel.  You can also throw some additional sea salt on top of the caramel at this point for more flavor.

Frosting
5 oz milk chocolate,.melted (my family dislikes dark chocolate so I always have to use some milk chocolate)
4.5 oz semi sweet chocolate, melted
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/8 cup cocoa powder
1/8 cup boiling water
1 1/2 sticks butter (room temperature)

Beat together butter and sugar.  Mix together cocoa powder and boiling water.  Add to butter and sugar mixture.  Add melted chocolate.  Be sure that the melted chocolate has had a bit of time to cool, otherwise the frosting will be runny.  Beat until smooth.  Frost cooled cupcakes as desired.

Sea Salt Carmels

For some reason, fall seems like the time of the year for making caramel. Part of it is residual from Halloween and part of it is preparing for the Christmas season. I have only ever attempted making caramel one other time, and it did not go so well. Recently I purchased The Field Guide to Candy, and now visions of sugarplums dance in my head (well truffles and caramels anyway). Candy making has always fascinated me and scared me at the same time. Oh, sure, I will make fudge at Christmas but tempering chocolate and pulling sugar have been quite intimidating. The chocolate tempering still needs work, but the sea salt caramels worked like a dream and tasted even better.