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Chocolate Caramels

A sweet caramel made with sugar, molasses, chocolate, and cream or milk, cooked until it snaps in cold water.

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, brown sugar, molasses, chocolate, and cream or milk.

  2. If using milk, add the butter.

  3. Stir the mixture constantly while cooking.

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

Set

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

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 the crystalline base that the cooked mixture sets around.
Brown sugar
Adds moisture and a deeper, toffee-like flavour.
Molasses
Adds moisture, chewiness and a robust caramel flavour.
Chocolate
Adds chocolate flavour and fat, firming the caramel as it cools.
Cream or milk
Adds fat and dairy solids that make the caramel soft and creamy.

The step that matters

Stopping at the cold-water test. The mixture must reach the hard-crack stage so the caramels set firm and chewy rather than soft or sticky. Cooking too little leaves them tacky; cooking too long makes them brittle or scorches the sugars. Stirring constantly prevents scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the nuts

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