salted chocolate caramels
I am not a candy maker. Heck, I’m barely a candy eater. Stop laughing; what I mean is, I prefer truffles, buttery cookies and crumbly, fruity things. But for some reason this season, perhaps another foppish attempt at service journalism, I seem to have gotten myself fixated on candy-making. It makes little sense considering the innumerable fantastic confectioneries in this city, but I think that at least part of the appeal is the long shelf life of cooked sugar. I like the idea of that you can give these to someone over the holidays and, if kept properly, they should last through January. Of course, not if you’ve made them well.
This month’s Gourmet magazine’s recipe for Salted Chocolate Caramels did nothing to curb this desire. Alex and I fell head-over-heels in love with salted butter caramel when we went to Paris last spring and friend had told us to go to the Berhtillon glacier (ice cream shop) on Ile Saint-Louis for the express purpose of trying their marron glacee ice cream sold only in only the winter months. Quite shortly, we were informed that they were out of the marron, but I had barely any time to mourn it when the salted butter caramel ice cream caught my eye. Alex and I shared the most miniscule scoop of the most abundantly complex flavor ever to cross our apparently deprived palates; not salty per se, but bright enough to hit all the notes.
