Still on a salt kick here! The weather has been awesome here in Seattle lately, and I wanted to kick off the ice cream season with a salted caramel ice cream recipe from the NY Times. I have never made my own caramel before and I was a bit intimidated by it at first. Once I got a good idea of how fast the caramel browns it was significantly less intimidating. I also used 6 egg yolks instead of 10, because it just seems so excessive to use almost a dozen eggs on ice cream! One more note, you really need to taste the salt you use and adjust the amount to your personal taste. I used a more subtle salt and used almost a whole Tablespoon more than it called for. Enjoy!

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

Adapted from Nicole Kaplan at Eleven Madison Park, New York

Ingredients

Preparation

1.

Place 3/4 cup sugar and the corn syrup in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Do not stir. Cook over medium-high heat to a dark caramel, swirling as it begins to brown to distribute the sugar. Deglaze with the cream; then slowly add the milk. The caramel will harden. Bring to a boil, then simmer, stirring, just until the caramel has dissolved.

2.

In a large bowl, whisk together the remaining sugar, yolks and fleur de sel. Whisk a little caramel cream into the egg mixture to temper, pour the egg mixture into the remaining caramel cream and mix. Strain the mixture through a fine-meshed sieve. Cool completely, preferably overnight, then freeze in an ice-cream maker.

At our house our essential condiments are hot sauce, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and some sort of fancy finishing salt. We were given a selection of salts two Christmases ago, and we've been slowing working our way through them ever since. We can now debate the qualities of Hawaiian pink salt versus French sea salt but I digress. As far as I am concerned salt's best friends are chocolate and caramel. They all work together so well they should really hang out more often.

I needed to bake something small, chocolaty and portable for a girl's night out. So I started by doubling my Grandmother's fudge pie recipe and went from there. I skipped the crust and put them into cupcake tins. I switched out the Hershey's cocoa for some fancy cocoa from PCC, switched the vanilla extract for almond extract and added caramel candies to the center. I cooked them for about half as long as usual and then added fleur de sel to the tops as they cooled. The result was my first real original baking recipe - Sunken Chocolate Caramel Cakes.

I erred on the side of under baking these, as nothing is worse than a dry cake. The end result was that the texture was somewhere between a brownie and a molten chocolate cake with the crust being chewy and sticky. The salt on top really made it. And while it is tempting to thoroughly douse the cakes in fleur de sel because it tastes so good, I implore you to restrain yourself as I did. The handful of bites that get the fleur de sel really make the flavors pop and I think if it was covered in salt it just wouldn't work as well.

So here is the recipe I took to girl's night out. I plan on making these again but perhaps using a crust and baking them in mini tart pans instead of the muffin tins. There are no leavening agents in this recipe so technically it couldn't be considered a cake but since I didn't use a crust I didn't feel comfortable calling them pies. Ah well, technicalities! Also I noticed that the caramel got a little too hard after these cooled, next time I will make my own caramel sauce so it stays gooey!

This is a great recipe because almost everything you need is already in your pantry!

Sunken Chocolate Caramel Cakes with Fleur de Sel

Prep time: 8 minutes
Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

2 sticks butter
2 c. sugar
1 c. all-purpose flour sifted
8 heaping Tbsp. cocoa
2 dashes salt
4 eggs beaten
2 tsp. vanilla or almond extract
12 caramels unwrapped
fleur de sel to taste

Preheat oven to 325 F. Melt margarine and cocoa together in microwave (about 1 min). Add sugar and remaining ingredients except for caramels. Beat with hand mixer until combined.

Pour batter into cupcake liners half way. Place one caramel on top of the batter for each cupcake. Add remaining batter to the top of the cupcake liner. These won't rise very much so the amount you put in each cupcake liner is roughly the size of the cupcake you will get.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, until batter is set and the tops are beginning to crack like brownies. Once done, sprinkle fleur de sel on cupcakes before they have a chance to cool. You can press the crystals onto the tops of the cakes so they stick well.

Yields 12 cupcakes.