Car-mel? Care-a-mel?

It's not really a sticky situation, but it does have me in a quandary. I don't know when it happened but at some unknown point, the word that used to be pronounced "car-mel" became "care-a-mel."  Every television commercial announcer who talked about the gooey, sweet treat began favoring the latter pronunciation.  I grew up saying the former.  I was delighted to see a recent TV commercial for caramel where the announcer pronounced it in typical "care-a-mel" fashion, but the characters in the commercial said "car-mel."  Perhaps both ways are considered correct.  For me, however, it's still "car-mel" and I'm sticking with it.