Monday 2 May 2011

Caramel Frosting - A Big Disappointment?

Here again was another recipe that I was unsure of.  I'm not sure how these recipes keep coming up, but they seem to find me.  I'm trying to look at it as an adventure because you never know what's going to work out - no matter how weird the recipe looks.

The caramel frosting is really unusual.  Bring brown sugar and heavy cream to a rolling boil, boil one minute, add baking soda, boil one minute more.  Add butter, do not stir.  Chill completely.  Beat until fluffy.  Eeeee gads.

As for the cupcakes - I really wanted to do a "Snickers" cupcake.  Make the batter for Devil's Food Chocolate Cake recipe, put one frozen mini Snickers into the center of each cupcake and bake.  I thought it would work beautifully together and be a really fun and interesting cupcake.  Sadly.  I live in Canada.  I can't GET mini Snickers.  Trust me - I looked.  In three different grocery stores.  So, I changed things up and decided to make Apple Spice Cupcakes.  Caramel and apple work together very well - I think.

My friend Kay makes her own applesauce, so I stopped in to pick some up.  She didn't have any "just plain" applesauce, so I gratefully accepted the peach applesauce and figured it would be just lovely.  She also gave me apple butter and I decided to substitute the regular butter for the apple butter and see how it goes.  Luckily, I had more than enough "stuff" to make the cupcakes over again if they didn't turn out.

After chilling the original "frosting" recipe overnight, I took it up and started to beat away with my stand mixer.  But because the butter was COLD it was CLUMPY.  Duh.  So I left it alone for a while and did other things until it came to room temperature.  Then I started beating.  And beating.  And beating.  I beat that stuff for almost half an hour.  It actually was quite fluffy and very yummy - but not at all what I would consider a "FROSTING" - it was very runny. 

I swear that when I took the bowl off my stand mixer, the mixer gave me a dirty look.  No really. 

I put the "frosting" in a different bowl and washed up my mixer bowl (I really need to get another one) so that I could start the cupcakes.  I sort of thought it looked more like muffin batter when it was ready to put in the oven, but who cares.  Toothpick clean after 20 minutes in the oven and out they came. 

Back to the "frosting".  In order to get it to frosting consistency, I started to add confectioner's sugar - just a tablespoon at a time, but then I got pissy and just started to dump the sugar in and mix so I have no idea how much sugar I added.  Probably I added a little too much.

To be honest - I don't think I'd make this "frosting" again.  It seemed like A LOT of extra work to get it to what I wanted it to be.

Then I tried it on the spice cupcake.  Oh.  My.  It went absolutely PERFECTLY together.  So I will keep the "frosting" recipe in my cookbook.

And I should not have been worried at all about the subbed in apple butter for regular butter - but I SHOULD have taken the cupcakes out even 1 or 2 minutes earlier, they're a little drier than I would prefer.  But they came out so delightfully that I didn't hardly care.

So - in the end, it all came out totally wonderful.  Told you. 

This is the Cane Girl - signing off.

No comments:

Post a Comment