I enjoy eating cupcakes (apart from overly sweet buttercream) but I’m not very good at making them, the best ones I’ve made were my Red Wine Cupcakes and Guinness Cupcakes these were chocolate based surprisingly and turned out well, but my attempts of normal vanilla cupcakes haven’t gone down so well :s.
I usually leave the cupcakes to the experts, I know the trend of cupcakes is dying out slowly but I want to be great at making them as I have been asked a number of times to make cupcakes. The perfectionist in me wants to get them right first before I can say I’m finally happy for them to be given to people, so I’m on a quest to find that perfect recipe to make cupcakes.
I have tried a number of American recipes out and looked into the recipes in detail, reading their reason why they think they have the perfect recipe but it all depends on how it works when you try it.
The original recipe was based on a chocolate cupcake but I used the basic vanilla recipe and made these into salted caramel as I was visiting my family and I know my sister in law has a major obsession with salted caramel. I would say this recipe is easy to follow and the mixture turned out fine, my only flaw with this recipe was that I found they were over baked. So I want to try them again and bake them for less time. I did think it was odd that the temperature was set low at 160°C fan, usually it’s about 175°C. I do need to experiment on the buttercream as I did find it overly sweet, although the texture was great and held well.
- 430g - plain flour
- 3 tsp - baking powder
- 265g - granulated sugar
- 1/2 tsp - salt
- 375ml - milk
- 125ml - vegetable oil
- 125g - butter
- 2 tbsp - greek yogurt (can substitute with sour cream)
- 1 tsp - vanilla extract
- 2 - large eggs
- 250g - softened unsalted butter (room temperature)
- 500g - icing sugar mixture (sifted)
- 2 tbsp - milk
- 1 tsp - vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup - caramel sauce
- 6-8 crushed lotus biscuits or any other caramel tasting biscuits
- caramel sauce for drizzle
- 1. Preheat oven to 160°C and line a muffin tin with cupcake liners.
- 2. In the bowl of a stand mixer combine the dry ingredients - flour, baking powder, sugar and salt. Turn mixer on low and allow it to mix for a couple minutes.
- 3. In a large jug combine all of the wet ingredients (except the butter) oil, milk, yoghurt, vanilla and eggs in a large jug and whisk well.
- 4. Add softened butter into dry ingredients and mix until the batter appears grainy with a sand-like texture to it. Next, add 2/3 of your wet ingredients in a slow and steady stream to the bowl until no dry ingredients are visible, stop the mixer. Mix on slow until the batter appears smooth. Scrape down the bowl and mix for another 20 seconds.
- 5. Line a cupcake pan with cupcake papers and fill each paper 3/4 of the way. Bake for 20-30 min or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.
- 6. Allow to cool completely before frosting.
- 1. In a stand mixer soften the butter and mix for 5 minutes so it gains some volume and goes pale in colour.
- 2. Add half the icing sugar and caramel sauce and mix on medium for 5 minutes. Then add the rest of the icing sugar along with 2 tbsp of milk and a tbsp of vanilla extract.
- 3. Continue mixing for 5 min until it's all well combined.
- Using a piping bag and tip, pipe the cupcakes according to how desire. Sprinkle with crushed
