Is it just me, or does butter seem to disappear almost as quickly as you get it home? I’m always opening my fridge to find that last stick of butter or sometimes worse, the last 2 Tbsp of butter – ahhh. That’s not going to get me far. I bought over six, one pound packages of butter last week. Already gone. Don’t worry, of course I didn’t eat all of what I make with that myself. Most of it I give to neighbors or friends. I cook a lot and bake a ton. A lot of that butter went to experimenting to create a delicious chocolate cupcake. I just recently posted a chocolate cupcake – just yesterday actually (the Almond Joy cupcakes) but I figured with all of that hard work in recipe testing I was going to get two recipes out of such a delicious chocolate cupcake =). Really you could frost the chocolate cupcakes with any frosting you wanted. You can use the fluffy vanilla buttercream I have posted, the chocolate cream cheese frosting, the chocolate buttercream frosting, or the cookies and cream frosting. But this time around, I wanted this to be a wow factor cupcake. An indulgent, melt away with each chocolaty bite cupcake. These are basically chocolate velvet cupcakes crowned with the most luscious caramel frosting. Their texture is so soft and so tender, and they are perfectly moist. I hate dry cupcakes and I hate spongy cupcakes so most likely you will never find any of the two here (unless it’s angel food cake).
I tried different piping and frosting methods on these cupcakes. First I did the basic dome like frosting by hand and smoothed it with an icing spatula. I decided it definitely was not fitting enough for these cupcakes, as I think these require a fancy decoration to showcase such an intensely delicious cupcake. The second time around I piped the frosting with the 2D tip (my favorite) and didn’t know what to do with the caramel. I drizzled it over the top and it just turned it into a sloppy looking mess. Finally my favorite method was to pipe the frosting on, then drizzle the caramel along the edges of the lacy frosting. It may seem a little time consuming so if you don’t care about the look then simply frost them how ever you like. A quicker method would be to use the tip that I used on the Salted Caramel Apple Cupcakes I posted then drizzle the caramel over the top. How ever you decorate them, please just be sure you try these cupcakes. You wont regret it. Enjoy! Wanna bite?? Make them. Now =).
