“Oh, Mom, I haven’t had caramel sauce in six years!”
Not since her serious dairy allergy had surfaced. About time, then! Okay, so this is what I did: for normal caramel sauce you mix one cup sugar with a half cup water. Stir on stove till it starts to boil; immediately stop stirring or you risk granules in your sauce. Some will probably form on the sides of your pan; ignore them. Watch carefully on medium or lower for, oh, five, maybe ten minutes-ish, depending on your temp and pot thickness, till the syrup starts to change color from clear to beginning to be golden. If your stove is like mine, it’ll turn slightly on one side first, in which case, pick the pot just slightly up and swish it gently around. (No spoons in there yet!)
So then you turn off the stove and–wait, read this whole paragraph first!–pour in 8 oz of heavy cream, and if you use nonfat milk instead I promise not to tell but I guarantee nothing; stir fast with a long wooden spoon while angling your hand away so it’s not right above the hot steam erupting in there. Trust me on that one.
Thickens when cooled. Unless you go all non-fat on us like that.
I did two batches. One with the last of the manufacturing cream. The second, I poured in a 6-and-something-oz container of coconut cream from Whole Foods to find out if both that ingredient and the size it came in would work.
We had our friends Nina of Ann Arbor Shawl fame and her family over for dinner Friday night.  I have to tell you: more of that caramel coconut got devoured on that ice cream than the regular sauce. It was good stuff.
The best part of it was seeing something much enjoyed but long denied now given back to my daughter. At last. And it was so easy to do.
(Note re the picture: the sauce isn’t separated, just eaten.)