How to make caramel sauce/salted caramel sauce ?

This is a one of the deadliest recipe I’m sharing in the space.There is always a confusion between the caramel sauce and caramel syrup. I , myself was in the confusion category until recently. Now that I have revised and practiced many a times I thought of clearing the doubt and sharing it in the space. I’m sure it ‘ll be helpful to many newbies out there. I have tried this recipe from Gayatris cookspot and from fondbites. Recently I learnt a shortcut method too which I will share it the coming days. I followed this recipe exactly from fondbites and have shared ma’am’s recipe ditto here in the space.I prepared this sauce for kitkat cupcake icing.  Stay tuned for caramel syrup recipe and for more interesting recipes !

Recipe adapted and compiled from : Fondbites

Ingredients :

Granulated white sugar – 2 cups

Water – 1/2 cup

Unsalted butter – 200 gms

Fresh cream – 1 cup

Salt – 1 tablespoon

Method:

1. In a heavy bottomed sauce pan, add the sugar and water.
2. Keep it on  medium flame.
3. Keep swirling up the pan until the sugar starts melting.
4. Do not use a ladle or spatula to keep mixing.
5. Just use swirling up motion on the pan.
6. If the base caramelizes quickly, remove the pan from fire, use a wooden spatula to mix up and scrape the bottom of the pan and put it back on fire.
7. Do not be tempted to keep stirring this step all the time.
8. It will crystallize the sugar.
9. Keep the flame in medium and wait until the sugar dissolves completely, while caramelization also happens simultaneously .
10. Once the sugar has melted, you could wait for few seconds until the colour changes to amber.
11. Here you can choose to stop at a lighter shade of caramel or until it goes up to 2 shades darker.
12. The darker the caramel, the better the flavour.
13. But you should also be careful that you do not smoke it up.
14. So at this stage you have to carefully watch and decide when to stop the caramelization process by adding the butter as in the next step.
15. Remove the pan from the stove and add the butter.
16. Keep stirring with a wooden spatula until the butter completely blends with the sauce.
17. It will whiz up, so you keep yourself a little far away from the pan.
18. It might seem impossible for the butter to get combined with the caramel, but keep stirring and the both will come together.
19. Add the salt and cream and mix well again.
20. Bring back the sauce on fire on medium heat for about 3 to 5 minutes until the sauce boils and thickens up a bit.
21. Switch off flame.
22. Cool sauce in room temperature and transfer to an airtight container and you can store it in refrigerator for about couple of weeks.
23. Before using on your cake, you need to thaw the sauce or microwave it in 5 seconds interval.