When caramel attacks

Last night I got all excited about fall and decided to make caramel covered pretzel rods because 1) caramel is the flavor soundtrack to fall and 2) I didn't feel like cooking a real dinner. You may be wondering what number 2 has to do with making caramel covered pretzel rods, and I'll tell you: Do unicorn farts smell like rainbows?

That's called a "redirect" and it's an ingenious method for distracting you from the subject at hand. Much like making a delicious, sugary fall treat like caramel covered pretzel rods when your family is actually expecting a nutritious meal like dinner.

I was very excited. I bought a huge tub of pretzel rods and TWO bags of caramels. You know, after you've made your own caramel, the store bought stuff just tastes... pretty damn good, actually. And it's way easier than burning off your fingerprints because you consistently forget that sugar boils at a temperature of OH MY GOD IT'S A NUCLEAR REACTOR! I'M MELTING! I'M MELLLLTING!

I thought they were going to look something like this:

Only without all that extra chocolate and candy because I did not think that far ahead.

Instead they looked more like this:

It's possible that's just what I looked like after fighting with hot caramel and a spoon and a dozen pretzel rods. Suffice it to say, it wasn't very pretty.

I used two sheets of buttered wax paper on which to lay my blobish pretzels, sliding one onto a cookie sheet and placing it in the fridge while the other just hung out on my counter waiting its turn. As it happens, cold caramel and butter waxed paper bond at a molecular level. They would not be separated. Like a sweet and salty Romeo to his thin and waxy Juliet. In the end, they both died in the garbage.

Batch number two was spared the cold and thus the tragic bonding, but I foolishly decided to prop them up in a decorative fashion in a tall coffee cup. My coffee cup now has bits of pretzel cemented to it. I doubt that's going to do anything helpful for the flavor of my coffee.