Two tones of caramel sauce

Continuing to work my way through Cooking for Geeks. There are "dry" and "wet" approaches to making caramel. This is a dry approach and I am a fan. 

Assemble the team:

• 1 part sugar,
• 1 part cream.

In this case, 1 cup of each. (Later I add a pinch of salt and 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract).

Start with just the sugar in a cold pan. Put over medium-high heat. DO NOT STIR -- until the edges have started melting. Then stir to blend the melted and unmelted sugars.

Once it is melted through you have a choice:

• Add the cream now
• Let the sugar darken some more

Or, none of the above. Divide into two batches and do both! Whenever you decide, add the cream slowly and stir to incorporate as you go. BE CAREFUL -- THIS STUFF IS HOT and STICKY -- a DANGEROUS combination. Add a pinch of salt and vanilla if you are so inclined (which I am).

Since you get different flavors developed at different temperatures I was aiming for a blended sauce.

What is an experiment without evaluating the results? An accident. So we sampled the light sauce, the dark sauce, and the blended sauce. Sharon liked the light sauce. I liked the blend best. They were all good. There was much more depth to the dark sauce.

Next time: I really like the blended sauce. I think I would divide the sugar and cream into 3/4 cup for the light sauce and 1/3 cup for the darker sauce and cook them in separate pans. I might not go quite as dark on the dark sauce. And I would warm the cream before adding it.

I dividing the blended caramel sauces in two containers so I could heat a small batch to serve without having heat the whole batch.

And for clean up, I just couldn't stand the thought of losing any of that great flavor stuck to the pan. So I deglazed the pans with milk, then drank the warm caramel milk.

Update 2/12/13: I just made this again using two pans and a 2:1 relation of light caramel and medium caramel and it worked out great!