Chocolate Salted-Caramel Mini Cupcakes

This is the last cupcake post from the days prior to Challengers of the Unknown, which means I will have to go back to using this blog as a vehicle to talk about my love life.

These are really good. They were a recipe I was looking forward to making, and I was right to be excited about it. If you make these, you will want to make them as mini cupcakes. As a rule, I think mini cupcakes are kind of a pain, since they take a lot of work and you have to make three times as many as you would if you were making regular-sized ones. But this recipe is pretty rich, and it might be hard to eat a whole full-sized cupcake, particularly if you do not have a glass of milk, as the women in my Relief Society did not.

This recipe is slightly complicated. First, you bake the cupcakes. The recipe is not difficult, which is good.

Next, however, you have to hollow them all out. I used a 1/8 teaspoon like a mellon-baller to hollow out my cupcakes.

Then, you make salted caramel, which goes inside the little craters.

Unless you, like me, follow Martha Stewart's recipe exactly and still manage to end up with this:

Yeah, that was supposed to be caramel.

The worst part about it was that this happened right before I was supposed to go to church. I carefully weighed my options:

1. Ditch out on Sacrament Meeting, run to the store, come back and make new caramel.

2. Leave the cupcakes and go to church without them. Hang your head in shame, as the Relief Society sisters have come to expect the cupcakes. Hope your lesson makes up for the lack of treats. Make the caramel tomorrow and find ingenious ways to get rid of 58 tiny cupcakes.

3. Use what what I had on hand, which happened to be Smucker's Caramel Ice Cream Topping. I cannot remember ever buying it, so that was pretty fortuitous.

I picked option 3, but don't think that it was an easy decision. Smucker's Ice Cream Topping bears no resemblance to homemade caramel. However, no one seemed to notice. And if they did, no one mentioned it to me.

I'm a little disturbed that I actually considered option 1. It has me a little bit worried about how seriously I am taking this stupid cupcake thing. At the end of the day, whether or not I make salted-caramel chocolate cupcakes will not matter much, even if it means I won't have them to show off in Relief Society. Once in awhile, I need to regain a little perspective.

The next day, however, I made another batch of salted caramel for the few remaining cupcakes, which I took in to work. I felt they were well worth the extra effort.

But it doesn't end there. After you fill the cupcakes and sprinkle the filling with a little sea salt, you have to make chocolate ganache frosting.

This you pipe on top of the cupcakes before sprinkling them with a little more sea salt.

Aren't they gorgeous? They ended up being almost like tiny, cupcake-shaped chocolate truffles. And, as I pointed out in Relief Society, they are the ultimate chick food: sweet and salty and very rich. If only I could find a man like that.

Chocolate Salted-Caramel Mini Cupcakes (makes about 56 mini)

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour

3/4 c. unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder

1 1/2 c. sugar

1 1/2 tsp. baking soda

3/4 tsp. baking powder

3/4 tsp. salt

2 large eggs

3/4 c. buttermilk

3 Tbsp. vegetable oil

1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

3/4 c. warm water

sea salt-I used the sea salt I bought at Trader Joe's.

Preheat oven to 350. Line mini muffin tins with paper liners. Whisk together flour, cocoa, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and and salt. Add eggs, oil, buttermilk, vanilla, and water. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed until smooth and combined, scraping down sides of bowl as needed.

Divide batter evenly among lined cups. Bake for about 15 minutes. Let cool completely.

Use a knife or a spoon to remove a small amount of cake from the center of each cupcake. Discard pieces or wolf them down with a glass of milk. Spoon 1-2 teaspoons of warm filling into each hollowed out cupcake. Sprinkle a pinch of sea salt over filling.

Fit a pastry bag with a medium open-star tip (Wilton #18) with dark chocolate frosting. Pipe frosting onto each cupcake, swirling tip and releasing as you pull up to form a peak. Garnish each cupcake with another pinch of sea salt.

Salted caramel filling--I do not trust Martha's recipe, as I will still maintain it was the recipe that made the caramel turn out badly, not my human error. I used the caramel recipe in my Essential Mormon Cookbook.

Caramel Sauce

1 1/2 c. packed brown sugar

3/4 c. light corn syrup

2/3 c. heavy cream

3/4 c. butter

Mix all ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly. Cool. Makes about 1 1/2 pints.

And here is a link to the frosting. It is extremely decadent.