Icecream Salted Caramel Sauce

Imagine the scene - craving something bad for you, you check out the kitchen.  You find icecream in the freezer, but alas, you want something a bit more fancy that a bowl of icecream.  If only you had some kind of terribly decadent topping for your icecream... but!  Tragedy!  All you have in the house except for icecream is some sugar, a bit of butter, and a salt shaker.

Rather than do something sensible and grown up like going to the store and maybe getting some vegetables, why not whip up some dangerously tasty salted caramel sauce?

Icecream Salted Caramel Sauce

4 tablespoons of white sugar
1 tablespoon of butter
2 tablespoons of icecream
Salt to taste, about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon (I like my salted caramel salty)

DANGER:  This recipe involves hot sugar napalm.  Be extremely careful with melted sugar, because quite frankly it is probably one of the most dangerous things in your kitchen.

Put the sugar and salt into a small, non-stick saucepan and place over a medium heat.
Note about melting sugar; avoid stirring molten sugar - to do so can make it grainy (melted sugar is a supersaturation solution of sugar - if you add some sort of seed crystal it causes the rest of the sugar to start clumping).  Instead, swirl the pan around as the sugar melts to incorperate the sugar evenly into the melted mix.
Swirl the pan regularly to help the sugar melt evenly.
When all the sugar is liquid and a golden colour (not dark gold), remove from heat and add the butter.  The mixture will foam violently!  This is normal.
Swirl to mix in the butter evenly.
Return the pan to the heat and then imediately add the icecream.  It may foam again, and that's fine.
Keep swirling the pan on the heal while the icecream melts.
Once the icecream is melted and mixed through, remove the pan from the heat.

You can spoon this directly onto icecream (the icecream will cool the sauce so you won't burn yourself on it), or leave for 15 minutes to cool.  It can be stored in the fridge, just give it 20 seconds or so in the microwave so it is spoonable.

Dangerously addictive!