I'm Back!

Okay, so, rather than a SUPER long post which would lose everyone (including me), I'm going to do one post per recipe like usual, in the order I made them. Sound good? Yup, I thought so.

December 16th: I used a new cookbook, Baking: A Celebration of Baking at Home. I received it as a gift some time ago, but I'd never gotten around to using it. So I started with a recipe that looked delicious: Chocolate Caramel Shortbread. Essentially, this is like making your own Twix at home. Sounds awesome, right? Well, it probably would've been if it had worked, but, unfortunately for me, it didn't. Now, I'll tell you up front that I've never successfully made caramel and that I mixed up a couple recipes at one point, which may have had something to do with my most recent failed attempt. But we'll get to that. For now, let's just get to the recipe itself.

Shortbread:
1/2 cup butter, plus extra for greasing
heaping 1 cup all-purpose flour
heaping 1/4 cup superfine sugar
7 oz/200g semisweet chocolate, broken into pieces
Caramel:
3/4 cup butter
heaping 1/2 cup superfine sugar
3 Tbsp dark corn syrup
14 oz/400 g canned condensed milk

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and line the bottom of a 9-inch shallow square cake pan. Place the butter, flour, and sugar in a food processor and process until the mixture starts to bind together. Press into the pan and level the top. Bake in the preheated oven for 20-25 minutes, or until golden.

2. To make the caramel, place the butter, sugar, corn syrup, and condensed milk in a heavy-bottom pan. Heat gently until the sugar has melted. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and let simmer for 6-8 minutes, stirring, until very thick. Pour over the shortbread and let chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours, or until firm.

3. Melt the chocolate and let cool, then spread over the caramel. Let chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours, or until set. Cut the shortbread into 12 piece using a sharp knife and serve.

Note: Superfine sugar can be made by putting regular granulated sugar in the food processor until - surprise, surprise - it's superfine!

I've never made shortbread in a food processor, but it seemed to work reasonably well. And the melting chocolate part worked well because, hey, it's a pretty simple task. But my continued nemesis is the caramel.

First, I confused this recipe with another I'd been thinking about using and put in 1 1/2 cups of butter rather than 3/4 cup. Now, if I'd only had another can of condensed milk, all would've been well because I just would've made a double batch. But, since I was second-can-less, I just had to fish out the extra butter. Which, again, would've been fine if it hadn't already half melted and if I hadn't already added all the other ingredients to the pot. So I pulled out as much as the solid parts as I could, and used my food scale to make sure I was getting all the excess butter out. As you can imagine, this also required scraping of the half-melted butter sticks to get all the corn syrup and sugar off. In other words, it was a mess/disaster.

I also only had light corn syrup, since every other recipe I've ever made called for light. As you can imagine, this means my caramel wasn't the right color. It also doesn't have the right flavor because the color between light and dark corn syrup is about more than color. Whoops. Dark corn syrup has a molasses-like ingredient as well as caramel flavor. So, in other words, I have something that's the consistency of caramel but doesn't really taste like caramel. Again I say, whoops.

My only other concern was that the recipe never specifies when the shortbread should be removed from the pan. To decrease the possibility of mess from pouring caramel and chocolate on the shortbread, I left mine in the pan. However, this make it a little difficult to cut the treat without destroying your cake pan. Next time I try this (yeah, I think I'll try again without the caramel screw-ups because the possibility of homemade Twix is too appealing), I plan on removing the shortbread from the pan to facilitate cutting. Learn from my lack of attention, kids, and good luck on your own chocolate caramel shortbread!