Molten Glucose Droplets

I decided to make something that would live up to the name of the blog. The most interesting idea I came up with was to fiddle around with caramelizing sugar to put in cookies. But it wasn't enough to just make a caramel sauce and put it in a cookie recipe, I had to get a little fancier. The result? Making caramel droplets by rapid cooling. It was a learning process. It took 5 attempts to get what I was trying to get. The end result of everything? Beautiful cookies spotted with chocolate, macadamia nuts, and caramel.

What you need:

For the caramel droplets:
1/2 c. sugar
A touch of water
1/4 c. heavy whipping cream

Ice, salt, and water

For the cookies:
1/2 c. butter
1/4 c. brown sugar

1/4 c. white sugar
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

1 egg
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 c. caramel droplets

3/4 c. pastry flour

1 c. rolled oats
1/4 c. chopped macadamia nuts
1/2 c. semisweet chocolate chips

Makes about 20-24 cookies

Let's get started... Though you'll need some special equipment on hand for the caramel droplets. Take a look at my setup.

The sugar and water go into the fry pan. The water is there only to improve conductivity from the pan to the actual sugar, as well as to prevent early scorching of your sugar. Next you'll probably notice my bowls. I've got a medium bowl filled with ice, salt (a liberal sprinkle over the ice to coat) and water to act as a bath. Inside that is a small bowl with some of the icy salt water in it. The salt is nothing to worry about. Salted caramel is a pretty good idea. Next, my cream is slightly hidden under the bowls. It's very important to have this all ready before you begin the next step because everything happens very quickly. Oh, and also keep a fire extinguisher nearby. You're dealing with boiling sugar, which is pretty close to what napalm is. Its temperature can reach between 320-350 degrees Fahrenheit (assuming you don't burn it, then it may get hotter and possibly more fiery) and it's very sticky. If it contacts your skin, you've got a very bad day ahead of you, so be EXTREMELY careful not to splash it around.

Everything is ready. Take a deep breath. Turn your burner to high.

The water will start to boil very quickly and evaporate from the sugar. The sugar should dissolve and start to boil soon after the water is gone. The following picture shows it getting close to that.

Once all the water is gone, bubbles of molten sugar will start to stack up and look like this

And soon after you'll notice the development of some caramelization. I actually recommend a fairly thin pan for this for a couple reasons. One being that if one side of the pan browns too quickly for whatever reason, you can shift the pan's position and the heat will almost immediately shift. The other reason is that since the pan is thin, there's not much metal to retain heat to darken your caramel past the point at which you choose to try and stop it. A con of the thin pan is you have to watch like a hawk, and stir a bit if you do get dark spots to even them out.

Continue cooking, carefully stirring if necessary

Cook until this point

You should just barely see little wisps of smoke coming out of the bubbles. At this point, immediately turn off your heat and add the heavy cream.

It will boil crazily for a couple seconds. You can probably just stand back, there's no reason for me to be stirring in this picture (It's actually quite a risk).

It will start to settle down

And eventually become shiny and free of bubbles. Use a spoon to transfer the caramel directly into the ice water bowl in a very thin stream, so thin as to make little breaks and form tiny pellets of caramel. The rapid cooling of the ice bath will instantly solidify the caramel.

A closeup:

Try and get at least half of your caramel into droplet form. Then, carefully decant (that is, pour off the water from) the droplets and spread out over a paper towel to dry them. Since this is water, they will partially dissolve and the water on the paper tower will look caramelly. So what, you still have droplets.

Now preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit with a baking stone on the middle rack and mix your cookie batter. To do this, cream butter and brown sugar, then cream in the white sugar, baking soda and salt, then beat in the egg, vanilla and caramel droplets, then work in the flour, then work in the oats, nuts and chocolate. For the flour and oats, I used my trusty dowel as a mixer. What a champ, that dowel. You'll end up with something like this

Scoop heaping tablespoons of cookie dough onto parchment paper on a pan you can easily slide it off of (perhaps a pizza peel). I usually do 6 cookies at a time with plenty of space between each since they do spread quite a bit. Slide the parchment paper directly onto the stone and bake for 4-7 minutes, checking often at 4 minutes.  Pull the parchment paper onto a wooden board (or pizza peel) and slide the paper onto a rack to cool. They should look awesome when you take them out of the oven, as follows.

Once they're cool (or just cool enough to eat), delight in these little wonders. Crisp on the bottom because of the stone, chewy on top because of the short bake time. Sweet, nutty, slightly salted, really an all around awesome treat.

Sidenotes:
You'll notice that in some of my caramel making pictures my amount of cream in my measuring cup changes. This is because I had better pictures illustrating the caramel color progression of my prior ineffectual attempts involving different ingredient ratios. Also, my cookies stuck together  because I had used a heaping 1.5 tbsp. measuring spoon. Though still delicious, it didn't make for as pretty of cookies. If yours happen to stick together, cut between them with a spatula immediately as you pull them out of the oven and they should seperate and solidify as individual entities. Go with a 1 tbsp. measuring spoon though, you want pretty cookies.

Special thanks to my roommate Josh for taking pictures of the caramel making process.

Thanks for reading!