My daughters have a special dessert that their brother enjoys. And as he was coming over for dinner, they said they would make this dessert. It's a yellow cake, with fudge frosting, and caramel sauce over the slices. Decadent, right?
Anyway, something went wrong with the caramel sauce. One daughter tried to fix it late Monday night. She finally went to bed and I found it like this, in the morning. The chunks are lumps of butter.
I told her I'd do something with it during the day, while she was in class. When heated, the lumps of butter melted, but a layer of butter would form on the top of the sauce when it cooled. My thought was that I needed a binder to hold the butter in the sauce. I cooked their sauce with a little cornstarch and allowed to cool.
After cooling, some of the butter did rise to the top. However, as what I had just made was basically a very sweet, thin pudding, I thought I could now mix in the butter that was on top of the rest of the sauce, using a mixer. And it worked beautifully. (see top photo) The pudding-like caramel sauce was cooled enough that the butter was held in the sauce, and could be poured over slices of cake.
Now who wants a slice? Incidentally, egg, flour, and arrowroot are also binders. All require cooking in a liquid to bind ingredients together.
