About the holiday season in itself I don't care much. But as an excuse to run up some additional mileage on my candy thermometer, I embrace the season wholeheartedly. These pecan and chocolate caramel chocolates are my first outing of the present season. In my dreams I have a chocolate coating machine in my living room and whenever the mood strikes I start it up and make a few thousand perfectly finished caramels and pixies and butter creams and fudge centers to box and share with friends and family.
In reality the fanciest I get when working with chocolate is a ceramic bowl and a rubber spatula in my microwave, so that totally coating centers is a very tedious exercise. Especially since my method of keeping my chocolate in temper is to keep stirring into it big lumps of seeding chocolate. As a result I figured out a long time ago that dipping keeps everything moving along much quicker. Salted pecans it turns out make a neat little handle to hold the caramels for dipping. The look isn't super refined, and they are a bit awkward to box. But the taste is terrific.
