I don?t know how I pulled this off

I am not really much of a baker.  Baking involves things like measuring and following recipes because it is a matter of chemistry and science, what with the flour and the baking powder and the baking soda.  Or at least, that’s what I’ve heard.

But for part of a holiday present I wanted to make some kind of cookies involving caramel, and the lovely Betsy forwarded me this recipe.  We consulted back and forth a bit, mostly about the fact that the instructions for the caramel involved wearing a long sleeve shirt and protective eyewear.

Scary, right?  I thought so too.

However, I bet you didn’t know this about me, but I am quite brave.  I really live on the edge.  For instance, sometimes I cross the street on a solid hand.  So I decided to give the caramel a go.   But first, I had to make the cookies:

Then I put on my long sleeves in preparation for the caramel:

No eye wear, though.  Like I said, brave.

The recipe calls for light corn syrup, but my local grocery store didn’t have that, so I bought this instead:

And then I put it all in the pan and started stirring:

Nothing happened for a while, and I was getting pretty annoyed because I’m an impatient person and I wanted to see some action in that pan.  But then things started bubbling:

And then everything happened all at once and I was running around grabbing cream and stirring and looking at my laptop and freaking out and then I poured the warm cream in and the whole thing bubbled like crazy and I would’ve taken a picture but I was scared out of my mind because I didn’t have protective eye wear on.

Finally, after all that, there were these:

Pretty good, right?  I think they’re okay.  The cookies aren’t the best peanut butter cookies I’ve ever had (probably because I again didn’t follow the recipe and used natural peanut butter) but the caramel is AWESOME, if I do say so myself.  However, I had a ton leftover and I didn’t know what to do with it so I ate like half poured it onto a sheet pan in hopes of making brittle:

Yeah.  Apparently that’s not how you make brittle, because it didn’t harden.  Maybe I’ll work on that one next.