Homemade chocolate caramels, cooked to a precise stage and then left alone to set.
A chocolate caramel was a small, expensive, once-a-year sort of pleasure, and it was remembered accordingly.
The method is unforgiving in one respect only, which is temperature. Sugar, cream, butter and chocolate are cooked together to a precise stage and then left alone to set. Undercook and it will not hold its shape. Overcook and you have made something closer to a building material.
Homemade Chocolate Caramels
MAKES
About 60 caramels
OVEN
No oven. Stovetop
TIME
25 to 35 minutes, plus 4 hours setting
Ingredients
- 1 cup heavy cream
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- ½ cup light corn syrup
- ¼ cup unsalted butter, cut into pieces
- 3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Method
- Line an 8×4-inch loaf pan with parchment, leaving an overhang on the long sides. Butter the parchment.
- Combine cream, sugar, corn syrup, butter, and salt in a deep heavy saucepan.
- Set over medium heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved and the butter has melted.
- Add the chopped chocolate and stir until completely smooth.
- Clip on a candy thermometer. Boil, stirring occasionally to stop the bottom catching, to 245°F to 250°F, the firm ball stage. This takes 25 to 35 minutes.
- Remove from the heat immediately and stir in the vanilla.
- Pour into the prepared pan without scraping the bottom of the saucepan.
- Leave undisturbed at room temperature for at least 4 hours, or overnight, until fully set. Do not refrigerate to hurry it.
- Lift out by the parchment onto a board.
- Cut into small rectangles with a buttered knife, wiping the blade between cuts.
- Wrap each caramel in waxed paper, twisting the ends.
Where homemade chocolate caramels come from
The dairy is what makes a caramel rather than a boiled sweet. As cream and sugar cook together the milk proteins and sugars brown, which produces the flavor that plain boiled sugar cannot reach however dark it goes. This is the same reaction that browns a crust or a roast, running slowly in a saucepan.
Chocolate for eating rather than drinking was a nineteenth-century development, and by the 1890s it was available in Canadian shops as a manufactured bar. It was not something a farm household made, and a chocolate caramel was firmly a bought sweet.
Waxed paper was in commercial use by this period and was what confectioners wrapped caramels in, for the same reason it is used here: without a wrapper, caramels find each other.
In a modern kitchen
The temperature is the recipe. Two degrees under and these will not hold a cut edge. Two degrees over and they will pull out fillings. If you own one thermometer, use it here.
The loaf pan is deliberate. Spread across a larger tin this quantity sets barely half an inch deep, which is too thin to cut cleanly or to eat properly. Depth matters more than shape.
Do not refrigerate to speed the set. Cold caramel sweats when it returns to room temperature and the wrappers stick.
Sugar-boiled sweets sit three weeks out on the Christmas baking timeline, comfortably inside their keeping time and well clear of the busy week.
How long it keeps
- Cool room: 3 weeks, wrapped individually and kept airtight
- Refrigerated: Not needed. Cold caramel sweats as it warms and the wrappers stick.
- Frozen: Do not freeze
Baking this for somebody else?
The Cottage Christmas Gift Kit covers the part no recipe does: how far ahead to make it, what survives a parcel, plus printable gift tags and tin labels. Free, four pages.
This recipe is one of forty-one in Christmas at Green Gables, which runs from the first cake of November through to the New Year. Everything on this site is written the same way it appears in the book.