Pecan caramel turtles
Clusters of toasted pecans under a spoonful of caramel and a cap of chocolate. Caramel taken to 245 °F stays where you put it instead of creeping out from under the chocolate a day later.
Set your infusion strength
Tell the site how strong your butter or oil is and every recipe rewrites its ingredient amounts to match.
Ingredients
6 tbsp infused butter
Set your infusion strength above and this splits into infused and plain butter to hit whatever dose you want.
- 2½ cupspecan halves
- 1 cupgranulated sugar
- ½ cuplight corn syrup
- ¾ cupheavy cream
- ½ tspfine salt
- 1 tspvanilla extract
- 8 ozsemisweet chocolate — chopped and divided
Method
- 01
Toast the pecans in a dry skillet until they smell nutty, then cool them. Arrange 24 clusters of five halves on parchment with the points fanned out, leaving room between clusters.
6 min
- 02
Combine the sugar, corn syrup, cream and salt in a heavy saucepan over medium heat, stir until dissolved, then cook without stirring to 245 °F.
245 °F · 20 min
- 03
Off the heat, wait until the thermometer drops below 200 °F, then beat in the infused butter and the vanilla until the caramel is smooth and there is no fat sitting on the surface. Nothing about a boiling syrup helps butter emulsify, and the wait keeps the infusion out of the heat entirely.
8 min
- 04
Spoon a level tablespoon of caramel over the center of each cluster, moving around the tray in order. The caramel is where all of the dose sits, so a generous pour on one cluster makes a stronger turtle than its neighbor — level the spoon every time.
- 05
Let the caramel firm up before the chocolate goes on, or the two layers will slide against each other.
20 min
- 06
Melt three-quarters of the chocolate over barely simmering water, then take it off and stir in the remaining quarter until smooth. There is nothing infused in this bowl, so it is worth taking the seed temper seriously — it sets with a snap and will not bloom gray in the box.
- 07
Spoon the chocolate over each caramel center, leaving the pecan tips showing so they still look like turtles.
- 08
Set at cool room temperature until firm.
30 min
- 09
Keep them in a marked box somewhere cool. Turtles look like boxed chocolates, and boxed chocolates get passed around a room without anybody saying a word about them.
Built on
Standard turtle: 5 pecan halves per cluster under 1 tbsp caramel cooked to 245 °F, capped with about ½ oz chocolate.
Every recipe here names the conventional ratio underneath it. The cannabis part is a fat substitution, not new chemistry — so if the base is sound and the substitution is sound, the recipe is sound.
As written
5 mg / turtle
1 mg5 mg25 mg
Set your infusion strength to move the dose.
Before you eat it
- These are estimates, not lab results. Treat the low end as the honest number and the high end as the thing to plan around.
- Start with one serving and wait two hours. Edibles take 30 to 120 minutes to come on, and the most common mistake is redosing before the first one lands.
- Test a small piece first. Potency is rarely even across a batch, especially if the infusion was not mixed thoroughly.
- Label anything you store with the date and the estimated dose, and keep it away from children, pets and anyone who did not ask for it.
- If you overdo it: you are not in danger, but it will be unpleasant. Find somewhere quiet, drink water, and wait it out. Do not drive.
More dessert
Brown butter chocolate chip cookies
The standard creamed-butter drop cookie, with the butter browned first. Browning drives off water and deepens the flavor enough to cover any grassiness in the infusion.
24 cookies
Fudgy one-bowl brownies
A high-fat, low-flour brownie that bakes dense rather than cakey. The cocoa does most of the work of hiding the infusion.
16 squares
No-bake peanut butter cups
Two layers, a muffin pan and a freezer. No oven, no smell, and the dose lives in the filling where you can measure it exactly.
12 cups