I call this one “conquering your culinary fears” (aka I made caramels and didn’t die.)

You see, I’ve had this irrational fear of cooked sugar for years now. No idea where it came from, because as a child I boiled my way through my mom’s candy cookbook without a second thought. Perhaps I ruined a pan or two at some point in my life, unable to scrape the rock-hard mass out of the (supposedly) non-stick surface. Whatever the reason, I’ve been scared to attempt any sort of cooked-sugar confection, let alone caramels, for quite some time.

But to be honest it really wasn’t that hard, and I even made it complicated by adding peach puree to the recipe (disclaimer: you can’t even taste the peach).

I kept the candy fairly light in a (failed) attempt to keep the peach flavor front-and-center, but if you prefer a darker, more robust caramel flavor you can cook the sugar slightly longer. This will produce a firmer caramel, so you may want to increase the cream as well.

The peach is practically invisible in the final product, unfortunately. If you concentrate really hard you may be able to discern a slight fruity finish, but without knowing that there is basically an entire peach’s worth of fruit in there, you’d think they were just regular vanilla caramels.

I think some other kind of fruit might be more effective at flavoring the candies, and in fact I might try the same process with the blackberries I have stashed in the freezer or the exotic lychees I found at the Asian market last week.

My only other qualm with the final product, other than the lack of peach flavor, was that the candies felt slightly greasy. I don’t know if it was the butter or the non-stick spray or something I did wrong in the process, but I’d like to find out how to make them less greasy in the future.

But look! Real, honest to goodness caramels!

Go me.