Caramel has always been a favorite of mine. Then everyone started adding salt to the equation. Ooh, even better. Then I started finding chocolate covered salted caramels.

Perfection.

I was already contemplating making the caramels when my sister pointed me to Ina Garten’s salted caramel recipe in the holiday issue of Food Network Magazine…

She does a bang-up job with the caramels…These are very easy to make. I doubled her recipe and made the caramels MUCH smaller than she does. (I have observed in the past that Ina’s recipes usually feed a crowd. In this case she just makes sure one piece of caramel is beyond satisfying. I’d rather have more and smaller.) I think I got double the amount of caramels she cuts.

They really are that easy to roll and cut (if you look closely, you can see the spiral of the rolling I did). I didn’t have paper to wrap them in, but I thought, “Look! They are holding their shape! I will just dip the TOPS in chocolate and add salt to them there.”

And they were things of beauty as long as they were in the fridge. AND I had set each one into a little mini-cupcake wrapper. But they STUCK to the paper, so I quickly took them out.

Ahem. And uh-oh.

Out of the fridge? They flowed like lava to meet the caramels next to them, joining finally into one big lava flow of caramel and chocolate bits (which were subsumed by the caramel lava). After I gave a few away, I had nothing pretty enough to give. Heh. That didn’t stop me from spooning a bit of caramel (and the chocolate I fished for) right into my mouth from time to time.

At room temp, this caramel is beautifully soft. Not liquid. Just…well, you know. Just lava.

Next year, I will dip each piece into chocolate and have them completely covered, which will contain the lava flows. Well, next year is already this year, isn’t it? Hmm. I may have to experiment in order to perfect the process by the next holiday season. (After the fact I experimented with parchment as wrapping papers–it works.)

I love my job.