Bitter Sweet Recipes

I decided to embark on making some dulce de leche the other day after reading about dulce de leche brownies. Im not really much of a fan of brownies but I absolutely adore caramel.

So I went down to the shop to buy the sole ingredient of Dulce de Leche; Sweetened Condensed Milk. Removed the Labels off the tins, Lined a Big pot with a tea towel (to stop the rattling) and started boiling the cans. When the water started boiling the teatowel dislodged itself and started floating in the top of the water so I decided to take it out and make do without it. After all, delicious gooey caramel is worth three hours of rattling!  About half an hour into the boiling I decided to read the labels which I had removed off the can and noticed in big bold letters it read “ATTENTION: DO NOT HEAT IN CAN”. At first I panicked, but hey, life isn’t so much fun if you follow the rules all the time!

There are a lot of different recommendations that come with making dulce de leche,  one is to poke holes in the lid of your cans and not immerse in the boiling water. Another is to just pop them in, keep them immersed the whole time, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Some people say you should only make it in the oven, others say to pour out the contents of the condensed milk into a saucepan and heat while constantly stirring until it turns into caramelly goodness.

Being a little bit lazy at the best of times, I went for the cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best option.

Well 2.5-3 hours later, the tins have a strange kind of expanded look to them, the lid looks scarily as if it is going to pop off, and the sides are slightly curved out. I decided that I should leave them to cool down for a few hours while I went to work… and hopefully when I get home I will be rewarded with some delicious dulce de leche.

Ok I lied… I really couldn’t wait for it to cool down I cracked open one of the tins over a bowl to see molten hot caramel flow out. I would caution against this as sugar burns are not always fun but if you really cant wait then be VERY careful.

I am storing one tin unopened in the cupboard and the contents of the opened one in a sterilised glass jar. This can be used for many different sweets, to fill pie cases, to make banoffee pie, to warm and pour over ice cream , as a sweet dip for sugar puff twists (will be posting a recipe soon) or you could just eat it on its own with a spoon for a sneaky midnight snack.

Guess who got to lick the tin...