Date Caramel Sauce

I have this very vague and very long list of recipes in a note on my phone, mainly ones that I want to try making (hello, vegan swiss cake rolls are killing me, I’ve been trying!) and others are just a slew of words that popped into my head and I need to get out before I forget them.

This vegan date caramel sauce was one of those ‘what was I thinking?’ notes in my phone, with a few ingredients jotted down and a very rough outline of how I thought the recipe would go. I had obviously typed the recipe out in a hurry and assumed I would know what my brain was talking about when I went to read it later (HA!).

I have this very vague and very long list of recipes in a note on my phone, mainly ones that I want to try making (hello, vegan swiss cake rolls are killing me, I’ve been trying!) and others are just a slew of words that popped into my head and I need to get out before I forget them.

This vegan date caramel sauce was one of those ‘what was I thinking?’ notes in my phone, with a few ingredients jotted down and a very rough outline of how I thought the recipe would go. I had obviously typed the recipe out in a hurry and assumed I would know what my brain was talking about when I went to read it later (HA!).

Luckily, I was able to cobble together a recipe and it ended up working, on the first try! My brain isn’t all that crazy after all, just moving too fast for my fingers to type.

There are a TON of vegan caramel sauce recipes out there, some use strictly dates and others use the traditional sugar/milk method, but I wanted to make one that combined the two, sweetening the sauce with dates, but while still getting the whole dark/caramel-y feel from brown sugar and utilizing the traditional stove top cooked method.

The solution was a hybrid of a lot of pitted dates, a good amount of brown sugar, and a little bit of vanilla, just to finish. This vegan caramel sauce turned out beyond what I was expecting, with the good, deep flavor of a quality caramel sauce while still holding onto a natural sweetness from the dates.

I’m envisioning myself swirling this into oatmeal, topping ice cream with a big spoonful and maybe making a nutella something with caramel sauce on top (<–recipe coming soon!).

Whatever way you slice it, having a basic vegan caramel sauce in your baking arsenal is always useful, even if the recipe was cobbled together from a few incomprehensible notes.

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