Give Your Caramel Sauce A Fragrant Twist With One Herb

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There are enough high-quality and even gourmet caramel sauces on supermarket shelves that you might wonder why anyone would want to mess around with homemade hot sugar. But once you learn the tricks to making caramel sauce at home, you'll find it much more rewarding and dare we say more delicious.

One of the benefits of a homemade sauce is that you can tweak the recipe to match your dessert by experimenting with different flavors. Lavender might not be the first such flavor to spring to mind, but with just the right amount, it will give your caramel sauce a heady floral note to elevate it beyond the everyday.

People can be a little nervous about using lavender in cooking, as a heavy hand will leave you with a dish that tastes like your grandma's soap. But a light touch of lavender is surprisingly versatile, pairing well with citrus fruit, pears, berries, vanilla, and chocolate.

To make lavender caramel sauce you'll need a couple of extra steps and some dried lavender blossoms. Be sure to use those intended for cooking like these from The Spice Way. The lavender flowers are first brought to a simmer in heavy cream and then left to steep before straining. You then continue the caramel sauce recipe as usual, making a wet caramel of water and granulated sugar, then finishing with butter and your lavender-infused cream. This cream infusion is essential to the process, so if you want to make a vegan version of the recipe, opt for vegan cream and butter rather than leaving them out completely.

As is, your lavender caramel sauce is delicious enough to eat from the jar or used as a dipping sauce for shortbread, but those floral notes are going to be brought to life when drizzled over apple crisp or sticky roasted pears. Alternatively, you can take inspiration from the Starbucks lavender menu and add your caramel sauce to a hot latte or iced coffee.

If you want to serve your lavender caramel sauce with something simple like vanilla ice cream or panna cotta, you might consider adding other flavors that will make the sauce the real star of the show. Vanilla, orange zest, or Earl Grey tea would all be delightful matches, and can simply be added to the cream along with the lavender.