Recipe, Salted Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes

Hello everyone!

I see I'm still slacking in the posting department. What can I say? I've had a couple of months of everyday living and cold weather (it's only now just beginning to warm up) and that has left me feeling a little uninspired. It was only last week that I decided I wanted to get back into baking (which I love to do) and actually made it happen. Spring is now upon us & hopefully the end of the freezing temperatures that I so hate. So, with that all said a few days ago I decided to make some chocolate cupcakes. I also made them a week prior & the cupcakes were perfectly tasty, but I miscalculated my marshmallow frosting and ended up with a bit of a runny mess. So, this time, I decided my cupcakes were delicious enough, and just changed what type of frosting I was going to top them off with. Enter salted caramel frosting. Heyooooo. Who doesn't love that? They turned out great and I've enjoyed eating three of them over the past few days (yep 3 of them whoops). Below are separate instructions for each area incase you want to search online and do your own frosting choice, or make them vanilla cupcakes instead of chocolate. It's all changeable and isn't that great? I actually halved the cupcake recipe because I didn't want to make 16 of them, as there was only me & Caleb in the house, so feel free to adapt away.



Simple Chocolate Cupcakes

Ingredients
- 1 cup all-purpose GF flour (I used Pilsbury which I've recently fallen in love with.)
- 1/4 cup cocoa powder (feel free to add a little more if you feel like it)
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup of sugar (can be all brown or granulated or a mixture of both)
- 1 egg
- 1/3 cup olive oil (or vegetable if you're that way inclined)
- 1/2 cup buttermilk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 cup of hot water

Method
- Preheat oven to 350F and fill cupcake trays with 16 cupcake cups.
- Mix together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder & salt. Then mix in the sugar.
- Once all mixed, add in the egg, oil, buttermilk & vanilla extract.
- Add in the hot water to create a relatively thin batter.
- Divide up equally to the 16 cups (should be about just over half way in each of the cups.)
- Bake for 18 minutes. Test with a toothpick to see if they're done.
- Take out of oven & leave to cool!

Salted Caramel Frosting

Ingredients
- 1/2 brown sugar
- 1/2 cup unsalted butter room temp
- 3/4 cup unsalted butter room temp (for different use)
- 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
- 1/2 cup cream (heavy whipping cream if in America)
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon pink himalayan salt
- 3 1/2 cups powdered (confectioners) sugar

Method
- In a saucepan put the sugar, 1/2 cup butter and corn syrup. Bring to a boil over a medium heat. Then reduce the heat and simmer until mixture thickens (should take about 3 minutes).
- Mix in the cream, vanilla & salt.

- Bring back up the heat and boil for 4 minutes. Then take off heat & leave to fully cool.
- Mix together in a mixer the remaining butter and cups of confectioners sugar, until it becomes smooth. Then place most of the cooled caramel into the mixture and mix again until you're left with a caramel coloured frosting.
- Leave aside some left over caramel to garnish the cupcakes with to drizzle over once the cupcakes are frosted.

I found the salted caramel frosting recipe online & will update with the website, once I can remember which website it was. Completely my bad for not making a note of it. Also, this time I used salted vegan butter, so my frosting actually came out a bit more salty that most people would like - so to please the masses, it would probably make sense to keep with the unsalted butter the recipe calls for.


I'm off to Austin, TX tomorrow, so expect a long blog about that next week after i've returned and probably gotten over my food coma! If you have any suggestions for places to eat there, feel free to let me know!