Dulce de leche is a thick, milk-based caramel sauce. It is probably most popular in South American Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, but variations exist in other countries and cultures as well. The most simple caramel sauce starts with sugar, and depending on the variation you have in mind, ingredients like cream and butter are added to the hot sugar to form caramel. With dulce de leche, milk and sugar are cooked together to make a caramel, a process that takes quite a long time but results in an incredibly rich-tasting sauce with a strong milky flavor behind its sweetness. It is similar to sweetened condensed milk (and can be made from it, too), although dulce de leche is thicker and much more caramelized (darker in color and flavor) than sweetened condensed milk alone.
While dulce de leche is becoming increasingly popular, it is still not widely available. As I mentioned before, it is possible to make your own, but if you’re not inclined to do so, buying it is also a good option. You will be able to find it at Mexican grocers, if there are any in your area, and at specialty foods stores, like Williams-Sonoma. Some mainstream grocery stores may carry it, but at the moment, most seem not to. You can also find different brands online, if you do a quick search. Try out a few different brands if you are ordering, since dulce de leche, like other types of caramel, can taste different from brand to brand.
Looking at this cupcake pan, I can’t help but think of the board game Battleship, where a bunch of boats are packed together in a rather haphazard way, waiting to be blown up by your opponent. I’ve played a version of the game with cars instead of boats, which is why the car lineup here looks so familiar to me. Memories of board games aside, the Classic Cars Sweet Rides Cupcake Pan is a very sweet pan all on its own. The heavy cast aluminium pan is made by NordicWare and bakes eight slightly-larger-than-cupcake-sized miniature cakes, each in the approximate shape of a classic car.There isn’t much detail on the cars, so you’re probably not going to be able to pick out any specific models just by looking at them, but their lines definitely evoke the silhouettes of cars from the 1940s.
The pan is nonstick and releases the car shapes fairly easily after being well-greased. Pay special attention to the windshield areas of the cars, since that portion is slightly more likely to get stuck inside the pan when you go to turn out the cakes.You can then use icing to bring the cars to life, giving them custom “paint” jobs and accessories before giving in and eating them.
The best way to eat dulce de leche might be straight out of the jar, but even that can get a bit boring after a while and it’s nice to take advantage of some of the other options you have with a big, open jar of the milky caramel. You can pair it with fruit, pour it on ice cream or swirl it into a big batch of brownies.
These dulce de leche brownies are very easy to make, given that the only variation between them and standard brownies is the swirl. That swirl, however, adds just enough extra “oomphf” to take these brownies from good to great. The brownies are fudgy and rich, without being too dense or heavy. The caramel adds a little extra moistness, a little extra fudginess to the areas touched by the swirl. The sweetness of the caramel also stands out against the chocolate background, and although I can’t say that you would definitely be able to identify dulce de leche in a blind taste test, you would definitely detect some of its caramel notes.
I like the swirl because it is an easy way to incorporate the dulce de leche into the brownie batter. Some of it sinks slightly during baking, so there is no need to do any more mixing than simply running a knife through the mixture. You could add a little bit more dulce de leche if you want to emphasize its flavor a little more (or have a big sweet tooth), but if you really want to do that I’d suggest making an ice cream sundae with dulce de leche brownies, vanilla ice cream and dulce de leche sauce, as the brownies might be a little bit too fudgy if you are overgenerous with the amount of caramel in the swirl.
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In the summertime, I really enjoy grilling pizza outside. It’s easy and it doesn’t heat up the house. All you really need to get started is a big piece of fresh pizza dough and something to pile on top. Topping combinations for grilled pizza are a little tricky, because where you might opt for cheese, sausage and tomato sauce over and over again on an oven-baked pie, grilled pizzas don’t hold up well to a ton of saucy, oozing toppings. I’ve found that grilled pizzas do best with fewer toppings. This means that some of the old standbys are best saved for traditional baked pizzas, and you are free to experiment with more diverse flavors – including some lighter and more complex flavors that might be lost on a regular pizza. This is where a book like Pizza on the Grill comes in. It is full of ideas for topping off those great grilled pizzas, toppings that can infuse a lot of flavor into a quick-cooking pizza, and it’s a book that will keep you inspired even if you’re a seasoned pizza-griller. There are meat-topped pizzas, vegetarian pizzas, seafood pizzas and even breakfast and dessert pizzas in this book.
If you’re not a seasoned pizza griller, it is not difficult to become one. The book starts out with a comprehensive introduction that walks you through basic pizza grilling technique for both charcoal and gas grills (I use gas). There are lots of step-by-step pictures to help you out and ensure that you’re heading in the right direction. There are also lots of wonderful photos of the various pizzas in the book, photos that look good enough to eat and will definitely send you out to turn on the grill if the names of the recipes alone don’t do it.
