coconut caramels

To toast the coconut, heat your oven to 300°F. Spread your coconut in a thin layer on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Stir every few minutes to ensure it browns evenly. Once it's a lovely golden colour (but not too dark), remove from the oven and set aside until you're ready to add it to the caramels. It shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to toast – mine was ready in about 15. Be sure to keep an eye on it as it can burn quickly.

Line an 8" square pan with parchment paper. If you don't have one, a 9" square will work, but the caramels will be a bit flatter. There's no need to oil the parchment as the caramels shouldn't stick.

Combine the cream, glucose, and vanilla bean in a medium-sized saucepan and heat until scalding, and then set aside. Before you add the sugar later on, remove the vanilla bean and scrape all the seeds back into the cream mixture. You could probably just use a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract instead if you prefer. I actually used a vanilla paste.

Choose a large (3 to 4 quart) heavy-weight saucepan to cook your caramel in – it needs to be large enough to accommodate the bubbling up that will happen (it will bubble up a lot), but deep is better than wide so your thermometer will be covered by enough volume to register an accurate temperature (most digital thermometers have a guideline indicating minimum depth).

Combine the sugar and water in this large saucepan and heat over medium heat until the sugar has melted. Raise heat to high and bring to a boil. Using a pastry brush and some cold water, brush down the sides of the pot to ensure any sugar crystals that may be clinging to the edge are melted. Alternately, you could put the lid on the pot and let it boil for a couple minutes covered – the steam that builds up under the lid will also melt away the sugar crystals. Do not stir the sugar at this point. Stirring may cause recrystallization. Instead, just gently swirl the pan a few times.

Continue to cook the sugar until it's amber coloured and it begins to give off a bit of smoke – the bubbles should have reduced in size by this point too. Remove the pot from the burner and allow to sit and continue to caramelize off-heat until desired level of caramelization is reached. A lighter colour will give you a sweeter caramel, while a darker colour will give you a more bitter caramel. It's totally a matter of taste (I cooked mine to about the colour of a shiny penny). If you've timed this just right, it will stop bubbling once you take it off the burner, but then will start up again just from residual heat. Sadly, mine didn't do this (it was pretty cool to watch it happen in the class), but it did continue to colour as expected. The reason this is done off-heat is that at this point the sugar can turn too dark on you really quickly.

Once you're happy with the colour, pour the cream mixture into the sugar and add your thermometer to the pot. Bring to a boil and add the butter.

Continue cooking over high heat, whisking constantly until it reaches 245°F. If you prefer a firmer caramel, you can cook it to a few degrees higher (I cooked mine to just under 247°F because the humidity is pretty high here right now).

Once it reaches temperature, you need to work quickly as the temperature will continue to rise.

Remove from the heat and stir in the salt and toasted coconut. Pour the mixture into your pan – carefully, it's very hot. Don't scrape the bottom or sides of the pot in case there are some hard bits (I scraped this stuff off onto a separate piece of parchment for myself). Allow to sit for at least a couple hours, preferably overnight. If you like, you can sprinkle a bit of fleur de sel on top of the caramel after it's cooled for 5 or 10 minutes (if you do it too soon, it will just melt into the caramel, but if you wait too long, it won't stick).

Once the caramel has set (preferably overnight), you can cut it into squares or rectangles and wrap in pieces of parchment paper or wax paper. If you're lazy like me, you can buy them pre-cut.