Caramelized white chocolate

I really love my pressure cooker, and I love finding new uses for it. One that I've been curious about for a while is using the pressure cooker to caramelize white chocolate. You put the chocolate in a jar, fill the cooker partway with water, and cook. I think I first read about this on Ideas in Food, but it wasn't until I got their cookbook (Ideas in Food), that I got up the nerve to try it out. (Although I am almost totally over any fear of the pressure cooker exploding, it was a little scary putting a closed up jar in there.)

On the left is how the white chocolate started, on the right is after an hour in the pressure cooker. (The recipe called for 30 minutes, but mine had hardly changed colour at that point.) I used the same vegan white chocolate recipe I used last time (with half almond meal and half soy milk powder).

I'll definitely do this again. Caramelizing the white chocolate gave it a really complex and delicious flavour. My favourite discovery came when I mixed a small amount of the caramelized chocolate into the uncaramelized stuff -- say, 1 part caramelized to 4 or 5 parts uncaramelized.

I used most of the caramelized white chocolate as Kamozawa and Talbot suggest: in their Popcorn Gelato. Mine didn't work out that popcorny (partly I think because I used plain popcorn, not butter-flavoured; partly because I wasn't able to strain the popcorn mixture thoroughly enough). However, it did work out white chocolatey and delicious! Here it is as a choc-top with caramel sauce.