smitten kitchen – Ali Does It Herself

Some day, I intend to do this recipe right, the way that Smitten Kitchen actually did it, with DIY caramel and unsweetened chocolate. But this is not that day.

I had a bag of caramels I’d purchased with the intention to do something else, and I felt obligated to use them. Plus I doubled the recipe and thus ran out of unsweetened chocolate. So basically this recipe is all wrong. But it’s still edible (read: extremely tasty) so whatever.

First you’re going to need to unwrap and cut your caramels. Start with about 10oz wrapped caramel candies.

Unwrap them and cut them in half.

When you double the recipe there are a million to do.

But finally they were finished. I recommend keeping this bowl cold because the caramels like to stick together otherwise. I discovered this by accident. There was swearing involved in solving this issue.

Now you can preheat your oven to 350°F and butter an 8″ x 8″ baking dish. Line it with parchment paper and butter that again.

Take 3oz unsweetened chocolate and roughly chop that up.

Because I doubled the recipe I ran out of unsweetened chocolate, so I chucked in this Cadbury hazelnut bar as well.

Throw your chocolate into a heatproof bowl with 1/2 cup butter.

Set the heatproof bowl over a pot of simmering water and melt it until it’s almost all melted away.

When you just have little bits left solid, remove it from the heat and stir it until it’s smooth.

Whisk in 1 cup granulated sugar. Then whisk in 2 eggs, one at a time.

Sprinkle 1/8 teaspoon sea salt over top and stir that in, too.

Then slowly stir in 2/3 cup flour.

Finally, add in MOST of your caramels (like 4/5 of them).

Spread your batter into the prepared pan and sprinkle the remaining caramels on top.

Bake that for 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean. In the meantime, feel free to lick the spoon. I won’t tell your mother. Just don’t tell my mother. She’s always paranoid about salmonella.