Salted caramels

I'm making salted caramels today. It smells amazing in here. These are the shells.

It's more of a ganache than a caramel but it's called a caramel because of the ingredients.

The sugar is brought up to just the point of smoking and immediately hit with a mixture of hot cream and Madagascar vanilla bean that I scraped into it. I put the vanilla in at the last moment so that it didn't loose any aromatics. That mixture is poured over white chocolate and stirred after everything gets to a happy temperature. Then when it's cool enough, it's piped into the molds. So now the ganache is in the mold. It takes a while to set because it was at a high temperature and lost it's ability to crystallize with stable crystals. Feel free to e mail me with questions about that.

I forgot to mention the salt. It's a grey salt. I like the roundness of it. It's the balance to the sweet component.

It's time to go see if I can cap it yet. It has to be firm enough so it doesn't get pushed out of the shell and cause a mess. Yes, I have done that.

I made 100. 25 are sold. I'm expecting a few to have shell bubbles that will go into a future scratch and dent category on the website with a discounted price. Sometimes you don't care what it looks like, you just want good chocolate. If you would like to put in an advanced order before the website shopping cart is online send me an email with your request.

UPS just came! I love the sound of that truck!

I just got an order of organic sugar from Florida. Now I have all the components to make an all organic chocolate. All organic chocolate! Very excited!