caramel and butterscotch question

[cteavin]

The holidays are coming and I'm playing with tried and true recipes to see what new variations I can come up with (it's also interesting for me to see what happens when you change an ingredient).

I made some hard caramel and hard butterscotch and I ground them in the food processor to a fine powder and sifted it to remove any large pieces. The first experiment was to substitute all of the (powdered) sugar for this caramel sugar in my Mexican Wedding Cookies to see if I could affect a less sweet cookie (and also just to see what it did).

Any guesses?

They spread into flat, crisp cookies. They're actually very good in their own way. Myself, I'd like to understand better what happened. I know the caramel and butterscotch sugars melted. My guess is that when making the original caramel the sugar became inverse sugars and the melting point for those sugars is much lower, so the spread. Does this sound right?

Now I'm wondering if I lessen the amount of butter if the flour will absorb the melted sugar for a stable shape. Any ideas?

edit: It's been and hour and I've just eaten a couple of these flat cookies. They're really crisp. The wax paper I left them on to cool was a little oily from either the butter or the oil in the pecans.

Edited November 23, 2009 by cteavin (log)

[Sethro]

Well first off caramel and butterscotch are of a totally different composition. Replacing sugar with butterscotch is obviously going to change the fat %.

More importantly is the difference between sugar and confectioners sugar. The cornstarch in confectioners sugar is going to help develop structure in the crumb. Even if you just replace the confectioners sugar with plain granulated sugar, you are essentially lessening the starch % and increasing the sugar percentage.

Its gonna take a few rounds of testing regardless to get the cookies to set up exactly the way you want, but my initial instinct is stick with the caramel powder (and not the butterscotch) to substitute 10% of it with cornstarch.