Bandi Caramel Evaporated Milk: Not What I was Expecting

One recent rainy morning I found myself in the kitchen aiming to make caramel of the type I use when I’m making homemade Twix bars. This means opening a can of sweetened condensed milk. I had, in my pantry, a can of Bandi caramel condensed milk, and it occurred to me that it might be a wonderful thing to use for this purpose, since it would provide an extra layer of caramel flavor to the finished product.

I opened the can, fully expecting to find a pale creamy brown viscous liquid — like regular sweetened condensed milk, but tawnier.

Instead, what I found was basically a solid can of caramel. Dark, rich, amber brown caramel. I mean, it was essentially a can of Kraft caramel.

While this is, of course, an entirely welcome discovery, at the time, I said to myself, “I cannot work with this right now.” I had something else entirely in mind. So I painstakingly scraped the caramel from the can into a glass jar (no, you can’t store opened cans of food in the fridge, everyone knows that), and stowed it in the fridge. It will, I am positive, come in handy some time soon. When I showed my husband and child this stuff, in the evening, after dinner and before dessert, they were enthusiastic, to put it mildly, and asked mock-casually, “What do you think you’ll do with that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but how about in the meantime we think about the chocolate pudding pie that I made for us to have for dessert tonight?” My husband had two slices, and my daughter horrified her parents by licking her plate clean like a cat.