Salted Caramel Cupcakes

This week I super excited to make 'something that tastes good' because I got a new cupcake book for Mother's Day. There are a lot of recipes that looked really good.

For Week 5 I've picked Salted Caramel Cupcakes. Oh My!

These cupcakes were so super fun to make. Well, probably only fun to me because I got to try some new things, as this was not just your typical cupcake.

First, I made the cake part of the cupcake. It was a pretty straight forward cake recipe which called for a dark brown sugar instead of the plain white sugar, giving this cupcake just a twist and making it fit batter with all of it's wonderful toppings.

While the cupcakes were in the oven, I melted some chocolate to dip my store-bought caramels in. these I probably would have eaten all by themselves but I knew they had a grander purpose.

Next, I went to work on the Caramel Buttercream Frosting. Up until this point I knew I was making a caramel frosting but didn't quite think all the way through to wonder how it was going to end up tasting like caramel. (I never really read the recipe all the way through before I start baking). Needless to say, I was surprised that the recipe actually wanted me to make caramel. What?!...but!it was super fun. All I had to do was put some sugar in a heavy-bottomed pot on the stove and started to cook it over medium heat until it started to melt until it turned all brown and gooey. I'd never actually melted sugar before so I had no idea that it would even do that. Now, it is a good thing I read the recipe for this part because I started pouring the heavy cream down the side of the pot into the melted sugar, just like the recipe said, and it started boiling and streaming like crazy. If I had poured all the cream right into the sugar all at once I'm quite sure I would have ended up setting something on fire. It was like doing a super fun science experiment. I felt like I needed safety goggles. And once the caramel cooled, I mixed it straight into one portion of my best vanilla buttercream frosting recipe, but only until it was swirled together (not mixed in completely). So pretty!

So, the cupcakes all put together were a brown sugar cake with caramel buttercream frosting topped with a chocolate dipped caramel and garnished with sea salt. this cupcake turned out looking pretty...well, pretty.

And they tasted great too! I was a little apprehensive about the sea salt but once you taste this cupcake you'll know you would never want one without it. the salt really accentuated the caramel flavors making this totally awesome. I'll definitely be making these again.

Overall Rating: 4.8 out of 5
(I'm not sure why it gets a 4.8 but things could always be improved, right?)