Dark side, light side... It's all the same hippy nonsense to me

:P

I walk in the twilight.

We have white chocolate chip cookies.

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

I just had a care package from Canada with butterscotch chips in it -- can't find them anywhere in the UK and it's very hard to do peanut butter squares without them!

<Nods, while pretending to know what they are.>

See, just like chocolate chips, only made with butterscotch. When melted down with some peanut butter and some chocolate, then poured over miniature marshmallows and stuck in a fridge to chill, makes a nice, easy, tooth-rotting dessert.

<offers peanut butter square>

/wants one now....

__________________________________
'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

What's the difference between caramel and butterscotch? I know they are different, otherwise, they wouldn't have different names. But I can't get my tastebuds to tell which is which. Am I malfunctioning?

Not a clue on my count,it's been a powerful long time since I had butterscotch.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blood! Death! War! Rumpy pumpy! Triumph!

Butterscotch is sort of creamy tasting toffee. If that makes any sort of sense. Caramel is more burnt-sugar tasting. To me anyway!

Mmmmmm...

Actually, as weird of an explanation as that is, I think it's pretty accurate!

Caramel (at least when the name is used in an encyclopedic sense) is a result of sugar oxydizing when it is heated above its melting point. Butterscotch, like Toffee, is made at lower temperatures by cooking suger with amino acids (i. e. milk or butter) added. It then oxydizes according to the Maillard reaction.

Both are brown, and made from heating sugar, and tasting somewhat alike, but chemically they differ. And since the Maillard reaction starts at temperatures lower than the melting point of sugar, you can achieve it by dissolving sugar with water or milk and boiling it to a point before all fluids have evaporated. That gives many more possibilities for crystallization: smooth fudge, grainy brittle, hard toffee...

Candy making is really a science. You know it when you find a recipe that starts with: "Wait for a day with low humidity"...

I've been wanting to make real dulce de leche (like I tried in Argentina) for a while now. It's better than any caramel/toffee/butterscotch product you can get in the US--thick, creamy, rich caramel that's good in or on just about anything. I've been told you can make it by taking a can of condensed milk and sticking it in a pot with boiling water until the water in the milk evaporates away, but I'm somewhat afraid to try for fear of setting off the fire alarms in my dorm if something goes wrong. It definitely is a science, and until I have a more scientific explanation of how to do it, I'm going to wait!

Must find & post recipe for butterbeer...

(Sorry to leave you hanging but it's somewhere I can't get right now)

**************************************
Signature or shameless self-promotion?
You decide:

[www.myspace.com]

**************************************

Sorry for the double post, but...


BUTTER BEER

It's not just for HARRY POTTER fans:

12oz. can BUFFALO ROCK GINGER ALE
2-3 spoonfuls of BUTTERSCOTCH TOPPING
(depending on the size of your spoon & personal taste, experiment with it)

Spoon butterscotch topping into a cup large enough to allow for fizzing,
pour in ginger ale & stir. Sip carefully & enjoy!

If you've never tried BUFFALO ROCK GINGER ALE, let me warn you that it's strong-
but a weaker brand won't cut through the sweetness of the butterscotch topping.
I've seen a recipe for BUTTER BEER that called for butterscotch extract-
but couldn't find that anywhere, so I tried the topping & I like it this way-
but if you can find the extract & want to try it like that, let me know if it's any good...

Now if you want to make this decadent, add a scoop of ice cream & make it into a float!

Would butterscotch schnapps work?

Bonzai Kitten Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Would butterscotch schnapps work?
-------------------------------------------------------

Certainly!

I came up with this variation so that the kids & non-drinkers could have some, the only thing that's a must is strong ginger ale-
I use this: [www.buffalorock.com]
but you may not be able to find it everywhere...

So if you can't find this kind of ginger ale, look for one that's dark- Canada Dry won't cut it!

Muse, I looked up recipes for Dulce de Leche and "it definitely is a Science" seems to be a bit of an understatement. The thing seems prone to explode at the slightest provocation! (You boil an unopened tin of condensed milk for several hours)

I cooked a 2 pound tin of baked beans in a campfire many years ago - my mate and I both thinking that the other had pierced the can. After about ten minutes it merrily boiled itself up into a seething cauldron, blew the can apart completely and hurled white hot beans at us at the speed of sound. These were so hot that they melted their way through the sides of the tent, seared holes in sleeping bags and left us with blisters where they hit our skin.

Two days later I was still picking baked beans out of unusual places - a facet of the story about which I don't care to elaborate.

I do remember once at summer camp we were sitting around a campfire with a cooler full of sodas--all different flavors. For the sake of science, we decided to place one of each flavor into the campfire and see what happened. Well, the cola just kind of rumbled and then popped, spilling fizz into the fire, the orange soda blew its top gracefully after about two or three minutes, and after five minutes of increasingly ominous rumbling, the grape soda exploded. We decided that, as important as replication is in science, maybe we shouldn't try the experiment again.

<wonders where the camp counselors were while all this tomfoolery was going on>

Perhaps Muse and Robert *were* the counsellors...