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Dessert

Chocolate Caramels

A sweet candy made from sugar, chocolate, brown sugar, cream or milk, molasses, butter, and optional nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Chocolate Caramels

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. In a saucepan, combine white sugar, Baker’s chocolate, brown sugar, cream or milk, and molasses.

  2. If using milk, add the butter.

  3. Stir the mixture constantly while cooking.

  4. When the mixture snaps and cracks when tested in cold water, remove it from the heat.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into buttered pans and add chopped nuts if desired before it cools.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Chocolate + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together440 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Provides sweetness and, as it heats, builds the caramel flavor and firm set.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture and molasses-like depth to the sweetness and color.
Cream or milk
Adds fat and moisture, giving the caramels a softer, chewier texture.
Molasses
Adds dark color, moisture and a deeper, slightly bitter sweetness.
Baker’s chocolate
Adds chocolate flavor and fat, deepening color and richness.

The step that matters

Stop cooking at the hard-crack test. Sugar syrup firms as its water boils off and its temperature rises. Removing it at the right point sets the caramels firm but chewy; too little cooking leaves them soft and sticky, and too much makes them hard or brittle.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, chocolate, cream, molasses, butter, milk):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Peanutfits about as well
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, chocolate, cream, molasses, butter, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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