Salted Caramel Squares

Warning: Do not attempt at home. This recipe should only be attempted by those with professional grade kitchens.

So, yeah, these were probably my biggest failure to date. Having been burned by hot sugar before, I was pretty gunshy about this one, which is why I think this failure was due to undercooking...


First, the dough was hard to work with. It was sticky and would not spread out in the pan. I think all the pushing and stretching made added to how tough it turned out

You can see if you look closely how the dough shrank during cooking. This caused problems later when I poured the hot caramel on top and it just ran off the sides of the crust.

Then there was the actual caramel. Either my stove is wildly underpowered (probable) or this recipe was just making up cook times. Below is the progression of the sugar caramelizing. Things started out promising...

Once I added the cream, things went downhill. It was supposed to cook on med-high heat for like 10 minutes, but after stirring and cooking and stirring and cooking, things didn't seem to be setting up.

Here was the temperature at minute 10 over med-high heat.

Here is the temperature at high heat after 20 min. See the difference? Yeah me neither.

I gave up and just poured the caramel on the shrunken dough base. Below is when I had just stuck it in the fridge and sprinkled a little flaked sea salt on top.

Here is the caramel the next morning (breakfast of champions.) As you can see, the caramel is running down the sides even after chilling for 10 hours. Look at the picture that accompanies the recipe and there is basically no resemblance. I have no basis from which to analyze this failure further, so we'll just have to wait and see if I get the urge to make caramel again to find out if it was me or the recipe that failed.