Hi all, this is Robbie,

Yesterday was my roommate Erik's birthday, so I made him a cake. He wanted caramel cake, so I searched through the Bittman book & found no recipe for caramel cake. I did find a recipe for a creamy caramel sauce! On page 922, I used the creamy caramel sauce recipe. The steps for making caramel are simple, almost too simple. I've made caramel in the past, and I know it's tricky. This recipe only calls for three ingredients, butter, milk, and sugar.

You can kind of see the butter in the milk, right?

Cook that in a pot until it's 245˚ F, and you've got caramel sauce!

Except that I burnt it.

I got distracted, forgot about how much I hate electric stove tops, and so came back to a heterogenous pot of what looked like simply warm milk, but actually had a layer of black on the bottom. Thankfully for me, a lot of that black stuff dissolved in the milk, so I just continued cooking and stirring, and ended up with a delicious caramel sauce - after I strained out the icky bits.

No more icky bits!

Then, once I had this sauce, I had to have some sort of cake to put it on! So I also made a cake, using a little too little flour, some of the caramel I just made (and a few of the burnt milky bits), eggs, sugar, etc. 

And here is that cake!

Happy Birthday Erik!

One thing I noticed quickly is that this sauce crystalized fairly easily once it was cool, but was equally easy to make back into a sauce. Regardless of technical issues, it was delicious.

Eat a cake,

-Robbie