The new bane of my existence...

At first it was frosting. My cake frosting never come out right - it was either too runny or too solid. After many failed attempts, I finally started to get the hang of it. Now I have come to another hurdle in my baking career...

Caramel.

Even the word makes me frustrated! I have tried making caramel twice now (once for caramel brownies and this time), and both times it hasn't been what I wanted. It's not that I burn the caramel, or it crystallizes, but rather that it just gets too dark. It looks like molasses! And I refuse to wimp out and make my caramel sauces out of those caramel candies - so I need to figure out how to make this work!

Anyways, onto my recipe for the week. I had the inspiration to turn a Twix bar into a cookie. Now - I know what you're going to say. A Twix is a cookie, just dipped in chocolate; but what I wanted was a cookie with chocolate chunks in it and caramel puddled on top of it. So I found recipes for a chocolate chip shortbread and a caramel, and went to work.

Twist on a Twix

Makes approximately 40 cookies

Chocolate Chunk Shortbread

3 1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup chopped milk chocolate

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees C
2. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside. Cream butter and sugar in a medium bowl until fluffy. Gradually stir in the dry ingredients, then add in the chocolate chunks.
3. Roll dough into 1 inch balls and place them on an unprepared cookie sheet (You can flatten them if you'd like). Bake in preheated oven for 25 minutes, or until lightly golden brown. Allow to cool 5 minutes on the pan and then move to a rack to finish cooling

Caramel

(Note this recipe makes a lot of caramel - you may be able to half the recipe)

3/4 cup sugar

1/8 cup light corn syrup

1/8 cup water

1/2 cup heavy cream

1 1/2 tablespoon butter

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

1. In a deep sauce pan over medium heat, combine sugar, corn syrup and water. Bring to a boil and cook the sugar. Don't stir the sugar!!! Instead, gently swirl the pan to mix. The sugar will remain clear for a while, but as soon as it starts getting color it will turn fast. Remove the pan when it is a medium amber color, because it will continue to darken off the heat.
2. WHILE you are boiling the sugar, in another small sauce pan bring the cream and butter to a simmer. I kept it on the element on low until the sugar was ready (but you could also remove it).
3. When the sugar is done, pour the cream and butter mixture into the sugar. Warning! It's going to bubble up, so do it slowly and be careful. Stir in the vanilla and remove from heat and allow to cool.
4. Once the caramel has thickened a bit, you can drizzle it on top of the cookies.

Going into caramel making I knew it would be finicky. It can go from a lovely amber color to black in a flash - so I made sure to watch my caramel like a hawk. I even took it off the heat earlier than I thought, because I knew it would continue to darken. But still it happened! I don't know if I'm doing something wrong or what, but for the life of me I can't make a nice light caramel.

Otherwise, the cookies are pretty darn good. This is a really good shortbread recipe, the milk chocolate inside just puts them over the top. Even if you don't want the caramel sauce, you'll have an awesome shortbread cookie for any event. The caramel, I don't know what to tell you other than don't leave it on the heat as long as I did if you want a lighter caramel! The darker caramel is still delicious, it has a more intense caramel flavour, but it isn't as pretty. And really, I'm all about making pretty things!