Chocolate Cupcakes with Salted Caramel Frosting

What could be better on a Friday night than a delicious cupcake? For me, nothing! Don’t let the complicated name scare you away from these, the recipe is quite simple. So are you ready for an adventure of deliciousness?!

First off, let’s start out with what separates this cupcake from all the rest…the caramel sauce of course! I’ve used this same recipe dozens of times, and no matter how badly I seem to screw it up, it still ends up tasting great! I would try to explain how to make the sauce, but this site does a much better job of it. The recipe can be found here… http://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/salted-caramel-sauce/

See, that step wasn’t too bad! Now onto the main part of this recipe, the cupcake! It’s quite simple, yet a delicious chocolate cake.

Ingredients (Yields 24 Cupcakes)

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 cups white sugar

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon espresso powder

1 cup milk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup of boiling water

Preheat oven to 325. Mix all dry ingredients together in a stand mixer on low speed until incorporated. Then, add the wet ingredients, minus the boiling water. Mix on medium speed for 30 seconds, or just until incorporated. Add Boiling water and CAREFULLY mix, starting on low speed and moving up to medium speed. Once all is mixed, line two muffin tins with 24 cupcake liners. Fill each liner 3/4 of the way full. Bake for 15-18 minutes, or until cupcakes are fully set. Wait until they are cooled to fill/frost.

Almost Done!!! Now while you wait for the cupcakes to cool, you can begin to make the frosting. Honestly, I rarely follow a frosting recipe, but I will tell you exactly what I did for this one.

Ingredients

12 tablespoons of butter (1 and 1/2 sticks) at room temperature

2 tablespoons of milk

2 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

~ 1/2 cup cooled caramel sauce

In a stand mixer, mix together the butter, milk, vanilla, and caramel sauce for about 1 minute. Then, add the powdered sugar and SLOWLY mix together. Once the cloud of powdered sugar is gone, increase the speed and make the frosting nice and fluffy!!!!

Now comes the fun part…DECORATING!!! I go a little crazy with this, so if a blog of frosting is all you want to do, go ahead!

Here is what I did. I first take the cupcakes and cut a small hole into them (a small paring knife does the trick) about the size of a gumdrop . Remove the gumdrop sized piece of cake, and fill with some caramel sauce. Next, put a dollop of the frosting on top of the cupcake, and spread evenly. If you have extra caramel sauce and feel ambitious, take some of the sauce with a spoon and drizzle it over the frosting.

And there you go, a cute and easy Chocolate Cupcake with Salted Caramel Frosting (and filling)! Now that wasn’t too hard, was it? Enjoy that cupcake and come back to the blog on Sunday when I’ll post how to use the same chocolate cake recipe, but in a totally different way!