Every October somebody at the counter asks which piece in the case is the boldest thing we make. For most of the year I have to think about that. In October the answer comes fast.
Our spicy chocolate caramels start the same way all our caramels do, with local cream and butter cooked slowly in small batches. Then in goes dark chocolate, cinnamon, a little amaretto, and cayenne. Sea salt finishes the top. The first couple of seconds taste like caramel. The heat arrives after that, and it builds instead of hitting all at once.
There is a real reason it builds. Cayenne gets its heat from capsaicin, and capsaicin is not a taste. It binds to a nerve channel called TRPV1, whose actual job is to report dangerous heat somewhere above 43 degrees Celsius. Capsaicin forces that channel open at ordinary body temperature, so the brain receives a burn signal for a burn that is not happening. David Julius shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for working out that mechanism. In a caramel, the practical result is that the heat behaves like a signal rather than a flavor, so it fades, and the salt is still there when it does.
Chocolate and chile were paired long before anyone thought to put them in candy. Pottery from Santa Ana-La Florida in Ecuador shows cacao being used around 5,300 years ago, confirmed by starch grains, theobromine residue, and ancient DNA. Further north, cacao was drunk rather than eaten, a bitter frothy drink beaten to a foam, and chile was one of the ordinary additions along with vanilla and maize. The Aztecs took cacao beans as tribute and used them as payment, which tells you how much the stuff was worth. Cinnamon came much later. It is native to Sri Lanka and reached the Americas on Spanish trade routes in the 1500s, which makes the cinnamon in this piece the newest ingredient in a very old idea.
I like our spicy chocolate caramels most in the last week of October, when the days get short and the shop gets busy and everything on the counter turns toward spice and warmth. It is also the piece I hand to people who insist they do not like spicy chocolate. Cayenne is a moderate chile and it is used with a light hand here, so what you get is caramel with a warm finish, not a challenge. Eat it slowly and the layers show up in order. Eat it fast and it just tastes like a good caramel with a kick at the end.
Either way it beats anything in a plastic wrapper. If you are in Ferndale this week, ask for one at the counter and see what you think.