I love cupcakes. I used to bake cakes, cookies, pies, brownies, fancy creme brulees and creme caramels, but then I discovered cupcakes. They are tiny, versatile, fun to decorate, fun to eat, and irresistible. I am always thinking up new recipes and reading other blogs to get ideas. Caramel is my favourite dessert base, and I was thinking about how to make a good caramel cake. Usually I make caramel sauce the way my mum taught me to, but this time I needed something richer. I remembered how much I love dulce de leche and incorporated that into my caramel cupcakes. Because of the dulce de leche, this recipe took a while to make.
I boiled 2 cans of condensed milk for 3.5 hours and then scooped out the rich, buttery caramel. I also made caramel syrup by boiling sugar and water until it turned to caramel, and then adding water to stop the caramelizing process. I needed both of these to cool overnight before using them.
Right now I do not own an electric beater, which makes baking much harder than it should be. To deal with that, I'm using box mixes and then altering them because they don't require me to cream butter and sugar until fluffy. I still have to mix until my arm is about to fall off, but the box mixes turn out better without an electric beater than cakes from scratch would. The upside is that it makes it much easier to experiment with flavours and recipes than it would otherwise. Right now, I've been using Betty Crocker Super Moist Vanilla and Super Moist Devil's Food Cake mixes as my bases, but I think Brittany has used the Yellow mix and likes that one, too (Brittany, correct me if I'm wrong).
For this recipe I followed the direction on the box, but instead of 1 cup of water, I added 1/2 cup of the caramel syrup, 1/4 cup of cream, and 1/4 cup of water. I've noticed that putting heavy (whipping) cream in box mixes makes them super light and makes them taste more homemade.
After baking the cupcakes (I like using the super tiny muffin tins so the cupcakes are bite-sized treats) I let them get completely cool - so they would be less delicate. While they were cooling, I took 1/2 of the dulce de leche and mixed it with heavy cream until it was a creamy consistency and a lighter, more caramel colour.
Then I used the cone method to fill the cupcakes with the thick, gooey dulce de leche and glazed them with the creamier frosting. Not too much though, because they are rich and sweet enough as it is.
Overall, the hardest part was making the dulce de leche because you just don't know what is happening in the cans while they are boiling. The cupcake process was really not very time consuming once all the caramel was ready to go and the cupcakes had a nice, light caramel flavour all alone too.
I recommend having these with a glass of cold milk or hot, unsweetened tea. They are addicting, though. Usually I only eat one out of every cupcake I make, and I definitely have had a couple handfuls of these.
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