One is never enough...

After eating one of these decadent caramels, you will find yourself reaching for another, and another and.....another. At least that is what happened to me....I believe that this is one sign of absolute culinary success (and also a lack of Laura's self control, but I'm going to stick with the culinary success idea for now). A few years ago my Mother made homemade caramels for the holidays and they have now become a tradition. In our family, we try to eat a well balanced diet, thanks to my Mom. We also believe in creating and indulging in mouth watering desserts. These caramels most definitely fall into the latter category. The recipe is from the late 1960's Better Homes and Garden Cookbook my mom keeps on her cookbook shelf. Actually, it is not a cookbook shelf, it is a cookbook cabinet. In my opinion, it could actually be considered a small cookbook library, so if you ever want to spend an afternoon browsing through cookbooks, contact my Mother. After paging through this lovely vintage cookbook, my mom ran upstairs and came back with a second version of this cookbook that she had tucked away for me years ago. She also has one for my sister. If you are lucky, she may even have one for you.

This year, our holiday caramels were topped with tempered chocolate and a dash of coarse kosher salt. Once again, this was none other than my Mom's idea. This may sound like an odd combination to some of you but the sweet and salty mix hits the spot.  Tempering is a method used when melting chocolate that helps the chocolate maintain a nice appearance for a few days after melting.  It prevents the chocolate from forming that chalky looking, snowflake like texture due to the specific melting process used when tempering.  This may sound like a scary process, but I promise, it's rather simple.  All you need to do is place half of the chocolate you want to melt  in a double boiler (a glass bowl rested on top of a sauce pan filled with water) and heat slowly until it is melted.  Remove the chocolate from the heat and add  the remaining half of un-melted chocolate, continuing to stir like crazy until it has achieved a consistent texture throughout. You may be thinking that this seems like a bunch of silly nonsense---but it will make your chocolate shiny and beautiful!
It's not the holiday season anymore, but don't let that stop you from making a batch of these sensational caramels. I'm sure they would be wonderful anytime of the year. I might make some today just to double check.

Caramels
1 cup butter or margarine
1 pound (2 1/4 cups) brown sugar
1 cup light corn syrup
1 15-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Melt butter in heavy 3-quart saucepan. Add sugar and salt; stir thoroughly. Stir in corn syrup; mix well. Gradually add milk. stirring constantly. Cook and stir over medium heat to firm ball state (245 degrees) 12-15 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in vanilla. Pour into buttered 9x9x2-inch pan. Cool and cut into squares.