Update: Carla has changed the cook-to temperature for these, after a few failed batches last year.

If you have received a bag of these from Carla as a holiday or birthday present, now you have the choice of waiting another year for another bag or making your own. Don’t forget to share; this is her own recipe, and she believes in feeding the multitudes.

• 2 cups sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup corn syrup
• Pinch salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Line a 9×13 pan with foil; make sure to line it all the way up the sides, and all the way into the corners. Butter the foil generously. (You can also use cooking spray; we don’t judge. Well, some of us do, but you still have our permission to use the spray.) If you can find it, use nonstick foil. The nonstick version will save you many minutes of peeling tiny, stubborn fragments of foil from the surface of the finished caramel with a pair of tweezers.

Combine all ingredients except vanilla in a 4-quart pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until butter melts. Allow caramel to boil, and cook until it reaches exactly 247 degrees, about 25 minutes. Remove from heat, and stir in vanilla. Immediately pour caramel into the foil-lined pan and allow to cool and set. Carla generally leaves them overnight, but they’re usually cool enough to cut within three hours.

To divide into candies, use a plastic cutting board or silicone cutting mat. Turn buttered pan upside down and allow caramel to fall out of pan onto board or mat. Peel foil off surface. Cut caramel into desired width and length using a lightly buttered pizza cutter; wrap pieces in waxed paper or commercial candy wrapping paper. (This caramel is so soft that if you don’t wrap the pieces, they will flatten out.) Caramels will stay fresh for at least two weeks.

Some possible additions: toasted pecan pieces; butter rum, raspberry or other flavorings; bittersweet chocolate is great, but the addition of chocolate will change the texture and make it thicker—somewhat like a soft Tootsie Roll.

Grandaddy’s Caramels

This recipe is included for sentimental value … the sad truth is that none of us have been able to make these caramels turn out well. We suspect that, like Grammy, Granddad fiddled with the recipe to make it work and never wrote down the changes. Here are the two versions we have.

• 2 ½ cups sugar
• ¼ cup corn syrup (or ¾ c corn syrup, for Version II)
• ½ cup butter
• 2 ½ cups whole milk
• ⅛ teaspoon cream of tartar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 ½ squares Baker’s Chocolate, if desired*

Version I: Mix sugar, cream of tartar, ¼ cup corn syrup, and 1 cup of the milk; boil together for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. In separate pan, heat remaining 1½ cups milk to boiling point. After sugar mixture has come to a boil, add remaining heated milk. Cook to firm ball stage, stirring every few minutes. Add the vanilla, then spread in greased pan. Cool before cutting.

Version II: Mix sugar, cream of tartar, ¾ cup corn syrup, and 1 cup of milk; boil together for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. In separate pan, heat remaining 1½ cups milk to boiling point; add to sugar mixture while sugar is still boiling. Cook to firm ball stage. Add vanilla and spread into greased pan.

We have no idea what kind of chocolate Granddaddy liked to add to his caramels, but we do know that Grammy almost always had a box or two of Baker’s Sweet in the pantry. It’s the kind in the green box, which we think is now called Baker’s German Sweet Chocolate. When we’re trying to get an exact match of an original flavor, we’ll go buy the Baker’s. Otherwise, we’ll use whatever King Arthur chocolate we have on hand.

from our beloved Granddaddy, John Curtis Marshall, a born engineer and flyboy, who could tell if a machine would work just by looking at the blueprint, and make great scrambled eggs