Caramel Cake

This past week has not left me with a lot of time for cooking or baking at home, a fact you’ve no doubt noticed since I went 7 days without updating Screw Your Diet. Well, Saturday’s veal chops were the first step to getting things back on track here, and now I have something sweeter for your baking pleasure – caramel cake.

This is not an especially difficult recipe, and it isn’t as overpoweringly sweet as it looks. You will, however, be making caramel from scratch and that can be a tricky process. Just be sure you have a candy thermometer and that you use a small or medium sized sauce pan instead of a large one like I did. Kind of defeats the purpose of the thermometer if the liquid is too shallow to measure! I eyeballed it and got lucky, but I wouldn’t advise you take that risk yourselves.

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Tart

My first attempt at a tart was made a couple of months ago - before I started this blog. It was a pure chocolate tart, and it was a delicious hit with my friends and family. For my second tart, I decided to try something even more ambitious – salted caramel with chocolate ganache on top. Of course, everything, even the caramel, was made completely from scratch.

It’s a fairly labor intensive recipe, but I’d go as far as to call the process exciting. Making your own caramel from scratch is a perilous and exhilarating process – like working with molten lava in a pot. The whole salty & sweet combination is one that will not necessarily appeal to everyone. After all, it is a fairly strange concept. But with just the right amount of salt on top, the flavor of the rest of the tart really explodes with every bite.