Salted Caramels

The best part about these cute little chewy, tasty treats is that I made them in the microwave.

I found this on pinterest. The only change to the recipe that I made was to add vanilla extract and sea salt.

It heats up in 7 min in the microwave and no thermometer needed. Way cool!

Ingredients:
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup granulated suger
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup light Karo syrup
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
sea salt

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a microwave safe mixing bowl.

I had little helpers :)

Heat in microwave (at full power) for 7 min, stirring every 1.5 to 2 min. Stir in vanilla extract.

Pour hot mixture into buttered 8x8 baking dish, sprinkle with sea salt immediately and cool in refrigerator about 20 min.

Cut the caramels into squares and wrap in wax paper. To cut these, I sprayed the knife with cooking spray and used an up and down motion rather than trying to pull the knife through the caramel.

I needed to clean the knife and reapply the cooking spray a couple of times. Cutting was significantly easier in the beginning, but about half way through, the caramel got very stretchy and came out more like globs than nice squares. Since, I was wrapping them, the shape didn't matter as I was rolling them into little logs anyway. If you weren't wrapping these and wanted to present them a different way, you'll need to work very fast or maybe put them back in the fridge halfway through to keep them looking neat.

Good news is, the caramels easily came out of the pan, no mess at all.

This made about 45 caramels, but as you can see in the picture, I wasn't very consistent with the size of them and some were way too big, so this recipe could probably make a few more.

They turned out just as good as any stovetop-constant stirring til your arm falls off-candy thermometer requiring-caramels, in my opinion. And they were super easy!

Some of the caramels did stick to the wax paper for some reason. I'm not sure why some did and some didn't. It wasn't terrible, just required a little extra peeling off of wax paper. I thought about maybe spraying the paper squares with cooking spray before wrapping, but I think that may make a greasy mess. Maybe wrap them in cellophane instead? I don't know.

But I like the look of the wax paper wrapped candies in this vintage-y blue candy dish.

Enjoy!



Linking up with these great parties (they're kind of a big deal):