As usual, I’ve taken a few creative liberties and created something a bit more unique, a twist on a snack cake, a Coconut Caramel Snowball. For those of you that didn’t grow up with this Hostess treat, a Snowball is a shortbread base with a semi-marshmallow semi-sphere on top, covered in chocolate and coconut. For my version of the treat I decided to use a semi-sphere of caramel cake, covered in caramel frosting and coconut. As an added bonus, I hollowed out the inside of the spheres, filled them with frosting and a chewy coconut caramel, and closed up the bottom of the cake.

So how was the recipe? I thought it was pretty good. The recipe was broken into several components: cake, frosting, clear caramel, and chewy caramel. The cake goes together very easily and would be great unfilled, just served with a little butter and tea. The caramels are also a great starting point for all things caramel; you can add variety of ingredients in order to change up the flavors: salt, coconut, lavendar, orange, or anything else you desire. The frosting is almost pure butter. The only thing that would make this difficult is if you had to make it without power tools .

I changed up the optional caramel recipe a little bit. Since these were coconut caramel cakes, I thought I would make coconut caramels. I replaced half of the cream with coconut milk and added a little bit of creamed coconut in place of some of the butter. The caramels have a burnt sugar, hint of coconut flavor, which are not at all sweet. The paired very well with the sweet frosting and rich cake. I had so many leftover caramels that I wrapped them up for later enjoyment.

Unfortunately I missed the posting date…again. This may or may not count, but either way, the cakes were great and I don’t regret finally showing them off.

Some foodgeek math for you:

Peanuts + popped popcorn + buttery caramel = crackerjackjef.
Divide the whole equation by 2 foodgeeks, you get zero.

I whipped up this quick batch of caramel corn with the intentions of having snacks for a few days, boy was I mistaken. You may as well just call this stuff crack, it’s that addictive. Five cups of popcorn slathered with caramel lasted a little under 12 hours I think, and that is only because I exercised restraint (and had to sleep a little bit).

The recipe, oddly enough, came from Making Artisan Chocolates. This recipe was marked easy, and it showed; the whole recipe took about as long as it took to pop the popcorn. I skipped the final chocolate step, piping thin chocolate stripes on the finished caramel corn, but it wasn’t missed. I think the book just added chocolate to stay on topic, but who knows, it could have been a welcome addition.

I don’t quite feel right about posting the recipe straight from the book. This book has more than enough good recipes in it to warrant the purchase and it’s cheap, too! (see above)

This past weekend I decided to make some caramels. Candy making is not my forte but it is something that is really interesting to me. There’s something about the process of making candy that is, to me, unlike anything else that is done in the kitchen. There aren’t any real fancy candy making techniques here other than using a candy thermometer and a (homemade) candy form, but it was fun nonetheless. Getting to transform a few simple ingredients like palm sugar, honey and cream, into something as creamy and buttery as these palm sugar caramels is just a little bit special.

Palm sugar is quite an interesting ingredient. It looks a bit like brown sugar but comes in an almost solid block that needs to be broken apart; the variety I used was sold as a large solid disc. I originally tried to chop this into a fine powder with my food processor but it failed badly. Since I was going to boil the whole thing anyways, I just broke it into pieces with my hands and dissolved it in water. I didn’t see much of a problem with this method and everything came out fine in the end.

I adapted a recipe that I got while I was in culinary school. To be honest, I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I made these candies only once and that was with supervision. It was a nice surprise to see these come out on my first try. I managed to make enough caramels that I have enough leftover to coat in chocolate (more about that in another post).

A few notes about this recipe:

• Boiling sugar is lava-hot. If you don’t want to get burned, don’t touch it while it’s cooking.
• Use a bigger pot than you think you will need, when you deglaze you will feel better that you did.
• Hot caramel + cold cream = sugar volcano – see above (big pot)
• Did I mention this sugar was going to be boiling?

Palm Sugar Caramel

17oz Palm Sugar
4.25oz Honey
14oz Cream

Put palm sugar and honey in a heavy-bottomed pot and cover with water.

Cook over high heat until the temperature reaches 160°C.

Remove from the heat and deglaze with the cream. Be careful when you do this it will bubble up and do its best volcano impression.

Cook mixture over high heat until the temperature reaches 122°C.

Remove from heat and pour into prepared form. I used a jelly roll pan with a homemade aluminum foil stopper lined with greased parchment paper.

Allow caramels to cool at room temperature. When they are cooled, turn them out of the pan and cut with an oiled knife.