Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Anyone have any ideas for me? I have always made the same chocolate sauce from The Joy of Cooking and it has never failed me. But I just found a recipe for Dark Chocolate Salted Caramel sauce and thought I'd try that for a friend's birthday.
In the first few steps, you cook 4 C sugar mixed with 1 C water over med high heat until it turns dark amber and begins to smoke…then you remove from heat and add in 1.5 C butter. So it was LIGHT amber and began smoking and at that point I removed from heat and added the butter. Soon it turned into a grainy, thick mix. I tried boiling it again to fix it, but no luck. So….can this mix be saved or should I start all over?
Thanks for helping me….I'm so irritated since I have a lot to do today and was hoping this would be quick and easy!

Maybe you stirred the butter in too quickly, causing the sugar to crystalize? I can't think of any fix except the one you already tried.

So apparently I just wanted to hear myself type...sorry.

Thanks anyway…and glad you had a bit of a diversion!

OK, so I waited a few hours and went to throw the mess out, but decided to give it one more try. I started heating it up again and it started burning. So I added a few tablespoons of water and lowered the heat. That actually did the trick. When it wasn't grainy anymore, I added the cream, then the chocolate and vanilla. So now I have a pot of dark chocolate sauce that is very thin, not thick at all. I'm wondering if it will thicken a bit as it cools? It also is just not very tasty. I think it is way too sweet and not the deep chocolate flavor I was hoping for. What a disappointment!

That just sounds like a bad recipe to me.

I'd go back to your tried and true recipe.

You are right, I will go back to my old recipe; but I have a few cups of this stuff…guess I'll save it for the grandkids…

If still thin I would use it in milk or add to a yellow cake batter.

It thickened up decently after it cooled, but is still a tad grainy and just lacks that deep chocolate flavor I was looking for.

Cookie, the graininess may go away if you leave it sit for a few days; I've had that happen before. No help for the flavor though.