How to make your own caramel sauce

Have you ever bought that caramel ice cream topping in a plastic bottle, the one you can buy in the supermarket, the one with the strange, slightly plasticky aftertaste and 1000 ingredients?

Ok, well I'm not speaking about any one product in particular but you get my drift.
Those type of products are expensive, they often contain preservatives, flavours and colours, they will NEVER taste as good as the recipe I'm about to give you and you're left with yet another plastic item that may or may not be able to be recycled.

Making your own real caramel sauce is quick, easy and only takes four ingredients.
And it's TO DIE for. It really is, don't make this if you have no will power because it will call your name from the fridge every time you pass it and you WILL NOT be able to ignore it.
Trust me on that.


Real Caramel Sauce

100 grams of butter (3.5 ounces)
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup cream

• Combine butter, sugar, golden syrup and cream in a heavy based saucepan.
• Put over low heat and stir occasionally with a wooden spoon until sugar is dissolved.
• Turn up heat to high and boil for at least 5 minutes.
• Take off heat and cool to room temperature.

This is the caramel sauce the day after it was made, when I took it out of the fridge to dollop some on a cupcake for hubby.
It is now lovely and thick and the blob I put on the cupcake slowly flattened itself out a bit and sat there looking extremely decadent. Then I put it in the microwave for a few seconds and it returned to a runnier state.

Either way, YUM!

Now to my mind this has several uses.

• It would make a lovely gift: a glass jar, a ribbon and a pretty label.

• Heat it up and dribble it over ice cream.

• Dollop it onto unadorned cupcakes.

• You could try the same trick I suggested with the chocolate syrup, pouring it over a hot cake and letting it soak in. You'd want to heat the syrup first to make it runnier.

• I wonder if you could even flavour milk or coffee with it.......I must try that.

• Eat it straight from the jar.

Go on, try it!