The Chocolates, they call to me.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love chocolate and caramel. Well, my friends, today I made caramel-filled chocolates with sea salt. Yesterday, I made the caramel (there are no pictures of the caramel). It was a dry caramel, one made without water, but with butter, cream and honey added at the end. The additives make it silky, and mellow out the flavor just a bit, which this caramel needs a little. Because this is no namby-pamby Kraft style caramel, this caramel is deep and dark, rich, brick red and just a hairsbreadth away from burnt. Such a dark caramel is complex in flavor, and really not all that sweet. I could eat it with a spoon.

I used Callebaut milk chocolate. It is smooth and creamy and sweet. This is one of those chocolates that literally melt in your mouth. I bought a couple of big blocks of it from Whole Foods today. I used some of it last year for the peanut butter cups (more of those this year, too. I just haven't made them yet.


The crowning touch is grey sea salt. The crystals are relatively large so they crunch when you eat the caramels. The flavor complements the caramel nicely.


And here they are in all their chocolately glory. They are presents for the holidays, so are off limits. But ooh, I had one of the cracked ones, and damn, one is all you need. They are rich enough to knock your socks off. Noah had one of the other cracked ones (there was an incident with a falling frozen pie crust in the freezer), he says they are too gastronomically interesting for him. I feel like I have succeeded.