Now, I have been having some serious chocolate cravings lately, so the cupcakes obviously needed to have chocolate. I went to loveandoliveoil.com, my go-to for cupcake recipes, and while the new one sounded good, it wasn't something I wanted to try today. I searched through recipes there that I had already seen, and somehow decided that I was going to try my own thing and make chocolate cupcakes with caramel in the middle. Sounds delicious right? I used The Go-To Chocolate Cupcake from Love and Olive Oil. I decided that some kind of caramel-y frosting was necessary, so I ended up browsing around and finding this Cupcakes With Salted Caramel Frosting recipe on cupcakeblog.com. I am a big fan of mixing and matching recipes, so I opted not to use the cupcake recipe, and naturally, I halved the frosting recipe. With the cupcake recipe(s) decided, we headed to the store.
I made the cupcakes. It took more than three hours total. This culinary experiment came rife with lessons to be learned.
Lesson #0: (I actually learned this earlier, but finally made use of the knowledge) With fluffy cupcake recipes (i.e. this chocolate cupcake recipe), seriously only fill the cupcake cups half-full, lest they overflow. I also took some other advice and ran my oven a little hotter this time, but seeing as my oven has an old analogue knob, I can't really say what temperature it was at.
With the normal cupcakes good to go, I cut store-bought caramels in half, balled up each piece and pushed it into the center of the cupcake. I threw them in the oven and waited anxiously.
Lesson #1: Don't put soft fillings close to the bottom of you unbaked cupcakes. My first attempt to retrieve what looked like a gorgeous cupcake out of the pan failed. Failed pretty hard. Turns out, the caramel I used not only exploded on the bottom of each cupcake, but also has the odd property that once heated and cooled, it becomes incredibly hard, despite being rather soft to begin with. After ruining two cupcakes. I decided to wait to extract the rest.
Some of the fail-cupcakes.
While I was waiting for the cupcakes to cool some more, I decided to start on the frosting. At this point, I actually hadn't realized the odd hardening property of my caramel, so I figured I would just throw some of that in the frosting and it would work fine. WRONG.
Lesson #3: When cooking with caramel, ain't nothing like homemade. This may have been one of my saddest cooking experiences. I figured the caramel might be a tad bit too solid, so I warmed it up a little bit before I threw it in the frosting. It was more that a tad bit too solid. It was just solid. No matter how I tried to beat it into the frosting, I was just making large hunks of solid caramel change shapes in my frosting base. I decided after a while, that this was futile, and that I had to make homemade.
Curse you, store-bought caramels!
I searched for a simple caramel recipe. I found this caramel sauce recipe on simplyrecipes.com. Only sugar, butter, and cream. Shouldn't be too hard, right? WRONG.
Lesson #4: When making caramel, use corn syrup and REALLY HIGH TEMPERATURES. The recipes says that you might burn your sugar, and if you worry about this, you can start out with sugar and water and let the water cook off. I decided to take this cautionary route, but added far too much water. I whisked and whisked and whisked for quite some time before it looked like the water was about to cook off all the way. I was right about that. I was not right thinking this was a good thing. My water seemed to all at once disappear, leaving me with solid structures of sugar, not like candy... just sugar in solid chunks, like when it dries out in the pantry, except more stubborn. I made a few seriously ill-advised attempts to salvage this batch, before coming to my senses and cleaning out the pan. For the second batch, I decided adding the butter first would be a good idea. It did not go any better, I got to the point where it looked like it might spontaneously dry out again, so I decided adding some corn syrup might help the ingredients mesh with each other and form something that looked like caramel. This seemed to help a little and I became less worried that it would turn bone-dry, but it still didn't look like caramel. I thought maybe the temperature was off maybe too low, or too high, and ended up turning the heat up all the way. It started to actually look like it was melting.
I didn't want the sweet-to-butter ratio to be off, so I tweaked by adding a little more butter and corn syrup until it finally looked like caramel. Took it off and added the cream and finally had what I wanted. Until it cooled and was clearly too solid for my frosting needs. I took out half (OH MY GOD, SO TASTY) and heated back up the rest and added more cream to thin it out. Now I truly had the caramel sauce (of about molasses consistency) that I needed. I finished up the frosting, which turned out softer than my normal buttercreams.
I pulled the rest of the cupcakes out of the pan with little difficulty, but they still had bottoms mostly of caramel. I decided the remedy to this sticky situation (haha, get it?) was just to let the caramel be on the top under the frosting. Thus I finally had my Inverted Double-Caramel Chocolate Cupcakes.
