Candy!

I just made this chocolate caramel covered matzo.

Holy crap. This candy was good.

"Chocolate caramel covered matzo," or even "chocolate-covered caramel crunch" do not really describe this. It's more like buttery, splintery toffee.

Those of you taking notes at home of my (extremely infrequent) baking and cooking entries here will remember that I fear caramelizing sugar. This is mostly based on a series of bad experiences I had with a cookbook which insisted that one could put a cup of sugar into a saucepan with a teaspoon of water and end up, somehow, with caramel. Well, all I ended up with was a.) burnt, nasty crust on my pans, and b.) crystallized burnt-sugar syrup. Amazingly, though, I was able to make this recipe work.

I used sucanat for this recipe, which I think is key to success. Sucanat isn't crystallized like white sugar (and brown sugar is just white sugar + a little molasses) so it melts smoothly into the butter. It doesn't absorb the butter quite like white sugar, though, so I added an extra couple tablespoons.

Anyway, you really need to make this. Seriously.

And while we're at it, here's the recipe I used to get over start getting over the caramelizing fear in the first place. It's for Millionaire's Shortbread*, but I like to just pour it into a buttered pan, cool it, and cut squares of it, either to coat with chocolate or make pecan turtles out of**.  Heaven!

One more thing, and this may just be my preference, but I do think that adding the full amount of salt into the caramel really improves it.  The sweet/salty balance is so much yummier than just plain 'ol sweet.  I actually upped the salt on the soft caramel recipe to 1 tsp.

*I love this term.  As if ordinary shortbread, made of 65% butter, is just not fancy enough for millionaires.
** Just take a few pecans, smoosh a square of caramel on them, and pour melted choc on top.