Royal Butterscotch 

Ingredient|% :---|---: Brown Sugar (TPA)|0.5 Butterscotch (FA)|0.5 Butterscotch (FW)|4 Cream Fresh (FA)|0.75 Meringue (FA)|1.5 Shisha Vanilla (INAWERA)|0.75 Vienna Cream (FA)|1.5

Flavor total: 9.5%

My ratio: 30/70

Hey, you guyses. It's been a while since I've submitted a recipe. This is one I've been working on for the past six months or so. I was never really happy with any butterscotch recipes I've tried; many being either too rich and sweet, leaving me unable to have as an ADV, or being way too up front and obvious with the butterscotch candy aspect. I like my flavors to have a little depth and lingering taste, which led to trying out some vanilla and cream to help blend with the butterscotch a little better than attempting to make a straight up plain butterscotch candy. If I had to describe this, it would be "creamy vanilla butterscotch drops"..maybe. I don't know. I'm bad at flavor descriptions. Give this a few days to age, and suck away at it.

Butterscotch Base:

TFA Butterscotch just doesn't do much for me at all. Anything I've tried with it has just left me a little disappointed, not to mention the almost burnt/caramelized properties I've noticed while trying to use it. FA is a little too dark for what I wanted in this recipe, but is very useful for adding some nice darkness to a caramel-heavy recipe, or taming bright flavors in some bakery recipes.

On my Flavor West journey, one of the first flavors I got was Butterscotch. Upon smelling the bottle, it seemed a little too candy-like, which is what I tried doing with it at first. After trying it standalone (8%), I knew I had to use it for the butterscotch recipe I've always wanted. Using FW Butterscotch (which is a tad too bright to use by itself here) along with FA gave me a really great start for this base.

Traditional butterscotch is made with butter and brown sugar, but nothing I tried with this combination turned out like I was picturing. I decided to omit butter, and focus on what a brown sugar flavor could offer to the mix. The obvious choice was TFA Brown Sugar (previously labelled as Brown Sugar Extra) and for good reason. TFA Brown Sugar adds an extremely useful touch of dark sweetness to bakery flavors. From previous trials with this flavor, I started with .25% and eventually settled on .5% here. This tames the candy properties of FW Butterscotch and adds a little depth to FA Butterscotch when combined with FW.

Cream Blend

As some of you guys know from my previous recipes, I love the combination of FA Vienna Cream, Cream Fresh, and Meringue in any recipe I use creams in. My typical "first attempt" cream base is 2% FA Cream Fresh, 1.5% FA Vienna Cream, and 1% FA Meringue. This is just that base tweaked to fit this recipe a little better. No special magic tricks. Just a few tweaks I already worked out before having the butterscotch base down.

Touch Of Vanilla

This recipe was decent on its own, before deciding to add vanilla. I wanted it to have a little more authentic taste, which led to the headache part of this. I tried TFA Vanilla Swirl, CAP French Vanilla, DIYFS Holy Vanilla, FA Vanillas, Vanillin, TFA and CAP VBIC, CAP VC, everything. Nothing was really coming out the way I had expected. As some of you know, I'm becoming a hard Inawera fanboy. I decided to give INW Shisha Vanilla a shot here. DEAR LORD. Perfection. Shisha Vanilla is one of those flavors that just impresses me in anything I use it in. This can be subbed for any other vanilla you have, but it won't have that magical taste you can only get with Shisha Vanilla. ^^I ^^swear ^^Inawera ^^doesn't ^^pay ^^me.