Caramel Apples (x2)

The apples, skewered and ready to go

In October we decided to have an evening of pumpkin carving and caramel apple making.  After all, what is Halloween without jack-o-lanterns and caramel apples?  Nora kindly volunteered her castle on a hill as our home base for this event.  The problem with that?  Getting some fairly large pumpkins up a mountain.  I loaded myself down with two Ikea bags full of pumpkins, apples, and other equipment.  I got some fairly funny looks on my way up, but that's to be expected, and made it up the mountain without any problems.

We did, however, have a few problems with the caramel apples.  Most caramel apple recipes call for corn syrup; corn syrup does not exist in Austria.  Or if it does, I could not find it.  I even tried the English shop, where they sell Betty Crocker cake mixes, but the owner laughed at me and reminded me that it was an English shop and corn syrup is a distinctly American product.  So we worked around it.  After all, caramel apples have certainly existed for longer than corn syrup has, right?

Eventually I found a recipe on www.101cookbooks.com/ that called for a honey-caramel glaze.  The recipe has simple ingredients, all easily located in Salzburg.  Hurrah!

Yet somehow we managed to screw it up.  The honey-caramel would not stay on the apples.  It melted down the sides, slowly, so that we would think for a while that we had succeeded in keeping the caramel on the apple, only to find that it had oozed down and created a puddle of caramel-goo on the tray.

Eventually we were tired and hungry and ate the apples as quickly as possible, in the hopes that we would be faster at eating than the caramel was at dripping off the apples.

In all of the chaos of the apple making, we never actually got around to carving pumpkins.  We scheduled that for a week later.

Panta: caramel apple model.  Note the lame excuse for a caramel glaze on the apple.

Caramel fail

Maybe the nuts will hold the caramel on the apples...? Nope.

Success (for now)

Nora laughing at how hard the apples were to actually eat

Mary

Clean plate club

In the meantime, I tried again.  I was not satisfied by our first experience - I like caramel apples too much to go without them for the entire Halloween season.  Besides, I wanted to prove to myself that I could make caramel apples that were as good as what I buy at home.  So I tried again, this time using a more traditional caramel recipe (the honey-caramel was too sweet for me).  Recipe number two went well, and I ate caramel and caramel apples for a week, which was enough to satisfy both my stubbornness and my craving for the season.

My second attempt

Great success!