Finally feeling a little better today. That flu, or whatever it was, had me down for the last 8 days straight. It was so awful. Head pounding all the time, and if you weren’t sleeping or laying down is was like the world was spinning all around you. Now I’m getting better. Still not 100% back to normal, but good enough to be up and moving around. Thank heavens!! But now to tackle the house. Ugh!
I had made these a while back, but haven’t been feeling good enough to bake or cook, so I decided to pull this out of my photo stash. This picture was after I decided to take my cooled Carmelitas and reheat them before taste testing. I couldn’t resist the way the caramel was spilling out like that. I had to take a picture. So yummy. I think the only thing I would have done differently is used dark chocolate instead of the milk chocolate chips, but that’s only cause I have a thing for dark chocolate ;-) Seriously amazing. Like a oatmeal cookie in a caramel lava waterfall with just a dash of chocolate. You gotta try this!!
Carmelitas with Homemade Soft Caramel
1 batch homemade soft caramel recipe (see below)
3/4 cup butter, melted
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1 cup flour
1 cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
6 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
Soft Caramel
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Start off by preparing caramel. Combine all caramel ingredients in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Stirring occasionally bring to a boil.
Once mixture comes to a boil reduce to medium heat so that mixture stays at a steady, moderate boil.
Cook mix for about 15 minutes, stirring frequently, until caramel starts to thicken and mixture resembles a golden color. Set aside.
In a separate bowl, combine melted butter, brown sugar, oats.
Flour.
And baking soda.
Pat half of the oatmeal mixture into the bottom of an 8×8” pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes.
Remove pan from oven and sprinkle chocolate chips over crust.
Pour caramel mixture over chocolate chips.
Crumble remaining oatmeal mixture over caramel. Return to oven and bake an additional 15-20 minutes, until the edges are lightly browned. Remove from oven and cool completely before cutting. When Carmelitas have cooled to room temperature, cut and serve.
Carmelita recipe from LuLu The Baker. Homemade Soft Caramel Recipe A Recipe Snobs original.
Jerome is this super quaint little town in Northern Arizona. It sits on the side of a mountain overlooking these gorgeous canyons below. It and Sedona have tons of fun art galleries. 
But one of the must see stops in Jerome is by this cool old falling apart building, where this old hippy gives blown glass demonstrations every 10 minutes from “12ish to 5ish” (Something I’ve always wanted to learn how to do). But this week was back to business and work. I decided to make these gluten free cookies that ended up being a huge challenge. You know how when you bake all the time how you can get kind of cocky? Like instead of reading over the whole recipe you just start skimming over them and then get this feeling like “I got this”. As if you’re now a culinary genius and can make any recipe with the simplest of ease. Then you totally bomb a recipe 3 times to give you a good dose of humility again. This was that recipe for me. First I accidentally used white sugar instead of powdered sugar and my eggs whites went flatter then a pancake. The second time I learned the hard way that after you add the warm chocolate to the marshmallow/egg mixture not to try and scrape additional chocolate out of the bowl and start mixing it again. Don’t do this same thing or else your dough will break apart and your cookies will come out completely flat (if you can roll the goo into the powdered sugar at all). 
