Salty sweets seem to be catching my eye lately. First there were those salty oatmeal cookies and now these dark chocolate cupcakes that are liberally sprinkled with coarse salt before baking and after frosting. The cupcakes were good, but the star of this recipe is the butterscotch icing. Oh my.
The recipe comes from a new book by Christie Matheson called Salty Sweets. I got the recipe here. The first time I made these cupcakes, it was for a family dinner on Christmas Eve. They were easy enough to make, but I thought they could benefit from a few modifications.
First, I scaled down the amount of baking soda from 1 teaspoon to 1/2 teaspoon. I also added 1 teaspoon of instant espresso powder to the batter. Second, and mostly importantly, I doubled the amount of butterscotch icing.
But that icing? Oh. My.
See, you really only need one batch of the icing to cover the cupcakes (unless you like a really thick layer of frosting), but you really should try this stuff drizzled over ice cream or straight from the fridge by the spoonful.
The icing is the only part of the recipe that gave me any trouble. You combine brown sugar, heavy cream, butter, water and coarse salt and cook it, on the stovetop, until it thickens. The first time I made the icing, I let it cook for the 15 minutes that the recipe calls for. Well, it never thickened enough that I could frost the cupcakes with it. I ended up beating the icing with a hand mixer to thicken it.
The second time I made the icing, I let it cook for almost 40 minutes. This time it thickened enough to stay put on the cupcakes, but it was pretty thin. In the end, I think I prefer the beaten version of the icing. It makes for a really nice mouth feel, you can mound it up like frosting, and it just looks better.
This sounds so good. My mom makes a home made carmel frosting for a butter pecan cake. I would like to try this frosting on that cake. I bet it’d be yummy. Um, who all got toffee? You know that’s my favorite right? I bet someone got it off the fax and ate it. Big meanies!
You should post the recipe for your famous fruit nougat. Chad got mad at me because I ate it all and he didn’t get piece. Loved the almond toffee too!
I don’t think so. This is more of a salty, caramel flavor. The brown sugar gives it a bit of molasses flavor. It is very good.
Okay so I am usually not a butterscotch fan, but my only experience with butterscotch consists of the hard candy and the instant pudding. It seems all of the ingredients in the frosting are basic, so does it taste anything like the gross butterscotch pudding I have loathed in the past?