Craft # 5d: Coffee Toffee Crunch

The third ice cream I brought for Mother's Day was coffee toffee crunch. In all honesty, this was Salted Caramel gone wrong.

There are a few things that I did incorrectly:
1. I ran out of white sugar while making this batch (I bought more to make the official salted caramel rendition posted yesterday) and used brown sugar instead.
2. I didn't want to use butter in the recipe, so I used Karo syrup. The syrup I had on hand is dark, not light.
3. I don't want to blame the blog, but... I was fumbling for my camera and in turn the caramel burned. (It was either that or I just didn't know what caramel looked like before it was burnt.)

From a recipe standpoint, I pretty much followed the salted caramel recipe. I started using only one cup of sugar (a combination of white and brown sugar) and Karo syrup (2T). Unfortunately I let it cook for too long and the caramel mixture burned. Hoping to salvage the ice cream, I continued the process of making the custard and added more brown sugar (at least another 1/2 c.), hoping to disguise the burnt flavor.

I didn't want to throw it out and Rich, ever the idea man, saved the day. He tasted the custard and said it reminded him of coffee, because of the bitter aftertaste. He suggested "Coffee Toffee Crunch" and I went with it.
So I mixed up the ice cream according to manufacturers directions and added a bunch of crumbled Heath bars to the mixture right at the end.

The end result was pretty good. In fact, if didn't know this was a total mistake, you probably wouldn't think anything of it. I'm not sure it can ever be replicated, but to be honest, the whole caramel-making process was more challenging than I had thought... so it might not be too difficult to burn another batch after all...

{The Mother's Day Trifecta}