I work with a woman that brings in treats whenever we have a tax class.  Which is fabulous as she can bake!  Once she brought in these little apple cider caramels for us.  I kid you not, the reaction around the room as each person tried them was OMG!  So I asked her for the recipe and she said she found it on the blog Smitten Kitchen so off I went and did the search and found the recipe for apple cider caramels.  I finally had a chance to make them recently and not surprisingly they were a big hit.  These caramels have a wonderful burst of apple cider flavour.

As her recipe recommends, it is important to prep all the ingredients by the time the cider is ready as once the cider is reduced you need to get it all done at once.  This is not a hard recipe to do but you just need to pay attention.

Line a 13×9 inch pan with parchment paper.  It needs to go up all four sides.

In a 3-4 quart pan pour in 4 cups of apple cider (not the alcoholic kind!) and bring to a boil.

This needs to be reduced down to about 1/2 a cup.  No less than 1/3 a cup.  This took me about 45 minutes or so.  In the meantime I gathered the rest of my ingredients.  In a small dish I mixed 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon and 2 tsp of sea salt.  Her recipe calls for flaky sea salt which I didn’t have so I ground mine a bit.

In a larger bowl mix together a cup of sugar and 1/2 cup of brown sugar.  I also set aside the 8 tablespoons of butter cut up into small chunks.

Once the cider is reduced it should look like this.

Stir in the butter, the sugars and 1/3 cup heavy cream.

Once it is thoroughly mixed put it back onto the heat and bring it to 252F/122C.  This will take about 5 minutes.

Remove immediately from the heat and stir in the cinnamon mixture.

Pour into the pan and spread out evenly.

I let it cool down a bit before putting it into the fridge to set completely as that is a lot of heat to throw into the fridge.  This part takes a couple of hours for it to fully set.  Once it is set remove from the fridge and pan and place on a cutting board.  Her recipe says to use neutral oil on the knife.  I didn’t have any so I used a very sharp knife to press down.  I also put some wax paper over the top so I could hold it down with my hand.  If the caramel got to soft I popped it back in the fridge for a few minutes to harden.  That way it didn’t stick to the knife so much.

I then individually wrapped each piece in wax paper.  3-4″ square should do the trick.

They did not last long!  🙂