Skip to main content
Dessert

Honey Caramels

A sweet caramel made with honey, cream, rum, sugar, lemon, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rum and vanilla work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 728 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Honey Caramels

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. In a saucepan, combine honey, sweet cream, rum, vanilla, sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Boil while constantly stirring until it reaches the hard ball stage.

  3. Add butter and boil for 3 more minutes.

Set and cut

  1. Pour into a greased pan and let cool before cutting into pieces.

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. Rum + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together728 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  3. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Honey + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,262 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Granulated sugar
Provides the bulk of the sweetness and, as it cooks, the firm chewy body of the caramel.
Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture and helps keep the caramel soft rather than grainy.
Sweet cream
Adds fat and milk solids that give the caramel a rich, smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat for a softer bite and a richer, rounder flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens flavor and helps prevent sugar from crystallizing.

The step that matters

Boiling to the hard ball stage. Boiling while stirring constantly is needed to reach the hard ball stage, which sets the caramel's firmness once cooled. Stopping early leaves it soft and sticky, while overcooking makes it hard and brittle.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (honey, cream, rum, vanilla, sugar, butter):

  1. Strawberryfits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, cream, rum, vanilla, sugar, butter. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesVanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes