These Caramel Apple Cupcakes have been in my recipe book for a while but the caramel calls for a certain temperature to be reached and so you need a candy thermometer. Finally I got round to getting one! So these were the first to be undertaken. I’m not a huge fan of apples and generally people are pretty shocked when I eat one. But these weren’t really appley and the creamy sweet cream cheese frosting and almost tooth achingly sweet caramel meant they were sweet rather than appley. I shan’t type the whole recipe out but I did make a few changes so I’ll talk through those, both good and bad!
So, let’s start with the cupcakes!
The original recipe also calls for cinnamon and ginger, of which I like neither! So both were left out. I think that if you like them and add them, it could only improve upon on the cupcakes, giving them something to reflect upon the sweetness. The recipe calls for the apples to be cored and roasted before being skinned, mushed (technical term there!) down and added to the cake batter. I’m impatient. Really impatient and I was desperate to get these done and finished so I skipped the roasting and just peeled, chopped and cooked the apples in a pan. A kinda homemade apple sauce really. Just chuck them in a pan with a splash of water and cook till the apples start to disintegrate, at which point I helped them along with a potato masher, then cook a little longer till they no longer hold their shape, cool, then add to the batter. Doing this took 20 mins off the recipe time but next time I would roast them cos I think that’d intensify the apple flavour. Other than that, I followed the recipe exactly, although I got 12 rather than 9 cupcakes.
Once baked, the cupcakes are filled with a cream cheese frosting using the cone method of filling. Cut a cone from the cupcake, cutting the cakey bit from the cone, leaving you with a thin top…
Then dollop in the frosting, as much as you can get in the cone…
Then just replace the top. Filled cupcakes!
Like nothing ever happened!
For the caramel, I made a mistake and didn’t read the instructions correctly, that's why I get for reading the recipe off my iPhone! So rather than only adding the condensed milk, syrup, butter and sugar (you see why it’s so tooth achingly sweet!) to start with, I added everything! I figured that I’d push on and see what happened. I figured I could start again later and I was curious to see if it would totally mess it up.
So bring to the boil, stirring (this is important, no need to ruin a pan!) then bring to a temperature of 248 degrees. Mine didn’t quite reach this temperature and I suppose it was cos I got bored of watching the slowly itching up mercury! So I gave in, took it off the heat and poured it into the bowl, stirred and it was perfect! One time when my impatience paid off! It didn’t pay off when I went straight to trying to get hot sticky caramel onto the cupcakes. The fist couple of cupcakes were v messy but as the caramel cooled and became easier to work with they became less messy. I didn’t put them into the fridge after each was coated but I should have. I was picking caramel off my worksurface for aaaaages! But they were tasty.
Better the day made, the second day they tasted somewhat stale. The caramel remained sticky though. I’m informed these are some of my best cupcakes! The caramel has been requested to go over ice cream twice already! Definitely worth the effort, especially if you have more patience than me!
L x
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