♥
While I have been dancing around Dulce de Leche, coming into contact with it’s lusciousness here and there, I wasn’t really aware of what it was called, or how it was made, until Bron Marshall, with her well honed culinary wisdom, pointed out how nice those yummy cinnamon shortbreads would be with it sandwiched in between. Then when I looked up how to make it, it was all condensed milk this, and don’t use evaporated milk that… Well we don’t have that fancy tinned stuff round here, so I thought, why not? So I dug a little deeper and found that basically all you need is milk, perhaps some vanilla bean, and an alkaliser, like bicarb.
Twenty minutes later we were cooking with gas, using a very approximate recipe, I mean surely we don’t need all that sugar? So to 4 liters of milk I put a generous cup of raw sugar, a nice juicy Madagascan vanilla bean, and 1/2 a teaspoon of bicarb soda dissolved in some water (just a hint for beginners like me – don’t add this after you have begun boiling the milk, or you may end up needing to clean your stove *ahem*).
It wasn’t long before the milk began to brown and, I always love these transformations, began to smell just like tinned condensed milk – really! A few hours later it was rich and thick and jammy and tasting very much like Werthers lollies – another project for the future – I would love to throw in a couple of shots of espresso at this point and continue boiling down to hard candy stage to make hard coffee caramels, one of my favourite lollies…
After it was cooled and poured into jars (in which it will last for months in the fridge) all that was left to do was the making of another batch of shortbread within which to sandwich the luscious caramel velvet, and being school holidays, it was the perfect project for the brood to get into.
Unfortunately it seems that I can’t even follow my own recipes so I found myself exchanging some of the flour for ground almonds and still more of it for Green and Blacks cocoa, to make rather yummy chocolate nutty shortbread. My child labour didn’t last the distance either, having eaten far too much mixture to have the stomach to continue cutting, so I was forced to finish the job myself.
Once the biscuits were cooled, all it took to get the kids ready to eat still more chocolate shortbread, was to sandwich two together with a generous spread of dulche de leche. The Chief Gardener was pretty impressed with them too.
Awesome!
Love the last pic of Sas with her tongue out…
I would be right there with her, yes, naturally with my tongue out too!
Thank you for the inspiration – such a hit, just so darn yummy!
That is Sas’s I’m-Just-Going-To-Do-Something-Terribly-Naughty-But-Entirely-Irresistable tongue, it’s funny – she’s been doing it since she was a few months old, it is such a dead giveaway, lol
I think these would post well
Your description of cooking the milk down evoked an olfactory memory of when I used to make caramels every christmas
Did you make hard caramels? Might have to pick your brains.
I do need to post you something – someone left his fave jumper in John’s car, is he missing it?
my wild child left his jumper?
soft caramels