Caramel Brownies

These are my favorite brownies to make.  I first had them at my dear friend Melissa's and had to have the recipe.  Her recipe came from the Artists' Palette Cookbook.  I can only make these when I can take them somewhere, otherwise I could eat the whole pan, alarmingly quickly.  This batch we shared with the great guys over at our local Firehouse.

1.  First step is to find something to entertain the children with so you can bake these with minimal mess! Did not work for me.

Ingredients:
14 oz bag of caramels
2/3 Cup evaporated milk, separated
18 oz. German Chocolate Cake mix
3/4 Cup margarine or butter, melted
6 oz. Chocolate Chips

Supplies (to eliminate a lot of dirty dishes, use the following):
Glass mixing Bowl
Glass pyrex measuring cup 2Cup or larger size.
wooden spoon/spatula
9x12 glass or non-stick pan

1. (Read step 2 and possibly decide to do this step first) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Melt butter in glass mixing bowl.  Add cake mix and 1/3 Cup evaporated milk (use pyrex measuring cup here) and mix until lumps are gone & batter forms.  Press half of the mixture into the bottom of the pan and bake for 6 minutes.

2. While this is baking, pour the other 1/3 Cup evaporated milk into the large pyrex measuring cup & begin unwrapping those caramels and adding them to the mixture.  Hurry, you only have 6 minutes!  Ha, you can totally do this step first & avoid the race against the clock, but I think this step is fun.  Once they are all unwrapped, you need to melt them in the microwave, at about 1 minute intervals, stirring between until the caramel sauce is smooth.

3.  Now take the pan with the half-cooked brownies and pour your caramel on top.  Next sprinkle the chocolate chips on that.  Finally take pieces of the remaining dough and stretch it out with your hands and sprinkle that on top (picture below is about half way through that process, dough should cover about 90% of the caramel when you're finished).

 4.  Put it back in the 350 degree oven for 15-18 minutes.  Once it cools you can try to pop the whole thing out of the pan and on to a cutting board to cut in squares or use cookie cutters.  Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.