Sea Salted Caramel

I've been on a cooking kick lately, what can I say?  And the great apples still in the store were just asking for a caramel sauce for them to take a dip in.  The lovely blog Ruffled Sunshine provides a great recipe (and a super cute printable!) that I decided to give a whirl.

You will need:
3/4 cup of heavy cream
.44 cup of sugar (Thanks to John, I now know that this is 1/3 of a cup plus 5 teaspoons)
3 Tablespoons of butter, chopped up
and some sea salt, just a bit

Of course, I never have everything I need for a recipe even when I go to the store specifically for recipe ingredients.  So, I used some kosher salt instead and it was just fine!

Here is what you do:

First, you pour the heavy cream into a sauce pot and heat it up over low heat.  While it's heating, put the sugar into a heavy duty sauce pot and heat it over medium heat.

Heavy cream, low heat

Sugar, medium heat

Here's where it is important to read ahead.  *Don't stir the sugar!*  It was so hard for me to leave it alone, but resist!  When the melted sugar turns amber, give the pot a few gentle swirls and remove it from the heat.

Too soon!  Don't swirl yet!

NOW you can swirl! 

Then, add in your chopped butter to the sugar and place it back on the heat

This is the stirring part.  Add in the heavy cream slowly as well along with a pinch of salt.  Let it boil for a couple of minutes and then take it off the heat.  Let it cool, and then pour it into a container.

I was amazed at how easy it is to make!  Homemade caramel in a matter of minutes.  I think sometime soon I'll dig up my grandparent's recipe for caramel corn.  Yum! :)

We had some old mason jars in the basement, so I used one of them (small sized) as my caramel container.  However, I had to make two batches to come close to filling the jar.

If I had a color printer, I would have used Ruffled Sunshine's adorable printables.  How cute would they be printed onto stickers!?