Failed Attempt at Chocolate Caramels

Well, it's been a while! Sorry about the late post but I've been away to Belgium for a few days and haven't really had much time to put up a post whilst unpacking and getting my GCSE results (4Cs 3Bs and 2As, but whose boasting?). Anyway, today I am putting up this blog post about a very failed attempt at a recipe I found online (Melskitchencafe.com to be exact) and basically I thought you might like to see how hard this was and how not everyone can do a recipe right the first time!!

Ok, so the recipe was from Mel's Kitchen Cafe and the lady who makes the recipe's, obviously Mel, must be American as all the ingredients were American or at least in an American measurement. So before even starting the making process I had to find alternatives for measurements and ingredients which wasn't too much of a struggle seems as we have Google *thanks the Google creators* so I was easily guided to simple British alternatives!!!

CHANGES!!
Golden syrup instead of corn syrup
Measure the temperature up to 118C instead of 245F 

If you want to do the recipe here is the link to it:  http://www.melskitchencafe.com/soft-chocolate-caramels-sugar-rush-6/

I would have written out the recipe but it would take so much time and I'm not sure whether it's copyright so... anyway I'm going to write out the alternatives to the measurements of the ingredients because they are written in cups rather than grams or ml so this could be easier if you can't find any measuring cups. The alternative measurements might not be fully accurate but they are as close as I could find.

MEASUREMENT CHANGES!!
1/2 cup of water = 118 ml
2 cups of sugar = 400g (it is actually a lot when you put it in so this sounds right)
1 cup of golden sugar = 225 ml
1 1/2 butter sticks = 170g
1 cup of dark chocolate = 168g (I put in about 1 1/2 bars of the dark cooking chocolate so about that)
there are other ingredients to add in but they didn't need channg into British measurements.

So what went wrong, I hear you ask?!
Well, the end product was stuck to the baking tray, the mixture was super super grainy. However I think it could have been because I was so impatient that I didn't wait for the mixture to bubble away to the correct temperature so it probably wasn't cooked correctly. In my defence the mixture was stuck between 107C and 108C for a good 5 minutes so I felt like it really wasn't going to get any hotter and so I thought lets just go and set this! After the recommended 2 hours of waiting for it to set, it was still runny and when touched it would remain on your finger when pulling away, so I thought lets put it in the fridge... yeah didn't set their either even after a whole night in the fridge!!

I gave up with the setting process and so I decided to try and get them out of the tray. Yeah didn't quite happen that way!! They were stuck to my greased tray and so remained on the tray. I used a spatula in the end to try and remove the debris which ended up straight in the bin!

Ok, so that is what happened when I attempted to make the caramel. I will most definitely try again as it didn't work the first time but this time I have a few different ideas I would do to try and make this work again. I have a few photos of the making process and they sort of match up to what Mel was doing in her making process so I think the end of making was where I went wrong.

The mixing of all the ingredients together over the heat.

The end product before time to set so it does look like I've not done too badly but yeah they most definitely didn't look like this when I had to scrape it straight into the bin!!

Well, that's the end of this blog! I hope you enjoyed and will even consider making these caramels. Anyway next blog I think will be about how I am making my nephew's birthday cake! It's hopefully a Star Wars (Darth Vader)/ Spiderman theme *crosses fingers* 

Thanks for reading!!
Caitlin xxx