caramel is basically just almost burnt sugar - she's putting way too much effort into this. Just dump a bunch of sugar in a pot (add water if you're not brave enough) and cook it. Cook it till it's brown. Bam - caramel. Milk/cream is just extra fancy, and burns easily, and why she's complaining about making caramel.
Is she gonna start with making some fancy hand crafted chocolate too, instead of a simple chocolate bar?
Wait wait wait, they have hard candy, but not caramel? If you overcook your hard candy it will turn into caramel. There's no world where someone didn't fuck up their hard candy, it turned a little brown and said "ehhh, maybe it's still ok to eat" (sugar is expensive so people would try to salvage it) and didn't discover caramel this way. I can only suspend my disbelief that much.