If one increases the ratio of sugar to flour in the dough of, say, chocolate chip cookies, at what point (if any) will it no longer make chocolate chip cookies and instead be chocolate chips embedded in chewy caramel?
In other words: At what point (if any) is dough no longer cookie precursor, but caramel precursor?
Best Answer
There are no similarities between the process of making caramel and making cookies.
Pure caramel has one ingredient, sugar. This sugar is cooked on the stove and brought to a high temperature until it changes color.
There are two products you may be talking about instead that are called caramel - caramel sauce and caramels, or milk caramels, a wrapped candy product.
Both of these are made in a similar fashion - heat sugar and other ingredients on the stove to a specific temperature point. These added ingredients include corn syrup, cream/half & half/milk, and butter.
While these ingredients share similarities to some degree with cookies, cookies rarely ever include liquids like milk as you need to keep the dough thick so that it doesn't spread, and will always include some sort of flour and (usually) eggs, which are not a standard ingredients in caramel recipes (and probably never ingredients).
The process for cooking is similar to pure caramel, they are cooked in a saucepan on the stove until they reach a specific temperature, something around 250F. At this temperature, the chocolate chips would be completely melted.
You can certainly make chocolate caramels, if that is what you wish, but you could not convert a recipe for chocolate chip cookies to a caramel recipe.
Adding more sugar to the cookies would make them spread quite a bit more (remember that sugar is considered a liquid in baking cookies) and eventually you'd get something like a lace cookie, which is probably the closest you'd ever get to caramel in a cookie recipe. Lace cookies contain flour but significantly less flour than sugar.
As an example, this recipe for Oatmeal Lace Cookies has only 3 tbsp of flour (and 2-1/4 c oats) but has a whopping 2-1/4 cup of sugar along with two sticks of butter. The method is also similar to caramel, in that it's a boiled batter that is heated in a pot on the stove and then baked.
This is probably the closest crossover you're going to get between the two. And, as a bonus, if you want chocolate, lace cookies are often dipped in or drizzled with chocolate.
Honey-Almond Lace Cookies from Food Network: