I became inspired to make something like these brownies once I successfully made this salted caramel recipe from Averie Cooks. If you think you want to take a crack at making your own caramel sauce, if you like caramel (I've said it before, but for the record--and you can write this down--I thought I didn't until I made some), you should give it a go. You just lay out all your ingredients before starting (because you can't be measuring out ingredients while you've got sugar boiling), and then it's mostly just watching it to make sure it doesn't burn. I've made it three times now, and my sugar starts to become caramel around 12-13 minutes of boiling.
But I digress. Go for it if you want (I have faith in you, dear reader). I've laid out some photos of what the process might look like below. Or, you can use jarred caramel sauce. That's part of the beauty of this recipe. Although multilayered, this recipe can be as easy as you want. These brownies are ridiculous and unnecessary. They are over the top and stupid indulgent. People love them. The pretzel crust (adapted from the crust in this recipe) is pretty thick and crunchy, and the brownie base I used is cocoa brownies (sans sea salt)--the now standard in our house. I've made them a few times, and each time I varied the recipe slightly to a different end.
In the first run through, I added the caramel about 10 minutes before the end of the brownies' cooking time. Once finished, you couldn't see the caramel at all, as it had baked into the brownie itself. Ultimately, I was needlessly disappointed--they still had a great salted caramel taste, but I disliked that the caramel's presence wasn't visually apparent. The second time through, I added the caramel just a minute or two before pulling them out of the oven, so there was a layer of melty caramel on top that would slide around as you tilted the pan. While nice to look at initially, it made cutting them very difficult (i.e., they looked like a nightmare when I was done) and would make packaging them next to impossible.
What I ended up doing in this final run through was to add the caramel about 5-7 minutes before taking them out of the oven, settling on the fact that they would be a little messy to cut but that there would still be a little caramel pooled at the top. An alternative way of doing it would be to use the first method (baking it into the top), cutting the brownies, and then drizzling a thin ribbon of caramel over them in a nice pattern. Something to consider. Onto the goods.
