I totally want to tell you about these cupcakes for the obvious reasons: The cake is uber-moist, the caramel is salty, sweet, and slightly runny, and the frosting is billowy, creamy, and intensely chocolate-y. And the combo of the three — big surprise — is amazers. (Yes, I am playing around with tween slang — just tell me to shut up whenever it gets to be too much.) I mean there clearly is no dearth of things to say about these cupcakes. 
I am hoping you’ll indulge me while I tell you just the tiniest bit about the origins of the recipe, the process I went through while developing it, and why I’d recommend you try your hand at it . . . asap. First, the origins: this recipe owes everything and then some to Matt and Nato’s sweet and salty cake (on the off chance you have read any of my prior posts, this should come as no surprise). I worked at Baked back in the day, and prior to doing so it was slices of the sweet and salty (a chocolate cake layered with caramel) that drew me to the bakery in the first place. And the technique for filling these here cupcakes with caramel (make a hole by sticking a large frosting tip into the top, twist and pull up — see the pic below — and then fill with caramel) is all baked, all the time. 
Now, as for the process of developing the recipe for these beauties, although I’ve been making sweet and salty-inspired cupcakes (or the cake version) for the almost 12 year old resident tester’s bday for more years than I can count, this is the first time I have made them using my own recipes for each of the components. The cake recipe you already know: It is the one for my extra moist and chocolate-y birthday cake, and the salty caramel is right out of my book, Icebox Cakes (used therein in the salty milk dud, the chai ginger, and the lemon caramel). The frosting recipe, however, is brand spanking new. In the past, when a yearning for chocolate frosting struck, I used this foolproof chocolate frosting recipe, and it’s totally spectacular, by the way, and baked always uses a whipped caramel ganache. But when it came down to developing my own, I kind of wanted the chocolate version of my (vanilla) old-school buttercream frosting (ie: a light and fluffy butter and confectioner’s sugar frosting).
I turned first to Hershey’s (I mean, does it get more old-school than that?), but the Hershey’s recipe called for melting the butter and cocoa powder together at the start, and for whatever reason (sometimes you just don’t know) I had trouble creating the fluffiness I was after. i then looked to a few recipes that were super simple and similar in technique to my old school buttercream. I added a bit more butter than some might think necessary, and a bit less than others might call for, as much cocoa powder as I thought said butter could handle (for uber-chocolate-y flavor), a hearty glug of vanilla, heavy cream (rather than milk) for richness, and just enough powdered sugar to make it sweet, but not cloyingly so. And voila: the final component of my own take on the caramel filled chocolate cupcake was complete (and utterly delish). And there you have it, the perfect remedy to that hankering for the chocolate-caramel combo, which we all know is kind of the best combo around. Or just the perfect cupcake. One that solicits oohs and aahs from a crowd of 12 year olds, and blissful silence from their elders.
[yumprint-recipe id=’51’]
