Moro Gold Max Caramel Cupcakes

25 November, 2012 by Neets 3 Comments

The wrapper says “A fistful of maximum caramel awesome”. I love caramel and this blog post is the one I’m submitting to Sweet New Zealand’s, December monthly blogging event hosted by Lucy of Kitchen Maid.

I saw a photo on Pintrest for Snickers Cupcakes, but Mr Fussy doesn’t like nuts so I was going to swap Snickers for Mars Bars. But then I spotted Moro Gold MaxCaramel. I’d rather something that was more New Zealand based so the Moro Gold it was.

In the end I didn’t use the recipe for the Snickers cupcakes at all, but I did for the caramel sauce, and the method of decoration.

The cupcakes and decoration is a 4 stage affair:

1. Make caramel sauce
2. Make cupcakes
3. Prepare filling
4. Ice and decorate.

It’s not something you will whip up in a jiffy, but you will be rewarded, especially if you love caramel like I do.

I used this recipe for the cupcakes. I had varying success of making caramel. The first I burnt, then the second I was so afraid of burning it that I didn’t cook it enough and it tasted of butter and cream. In the end I took out the recipe/instructions from David Lebovitz’s Ready for Dessert for making a dry caramel, and added my second “caramel” for the wet ingredients to the dry caramel. Then I didn’t want to use it because it was fantastic and I wanted to just spoon the stuff straight into my mouth and not share. But I came to my senses.

I used two Moro Gold Maxcaramel bars for this recipe, including the larger sized pieces on top of the cupcakes.

I ended up with 33 cupcakes from the recipe I used. I have frozen 13 of them, we ate 3 of them, and 1 unadorned cupcake for quality control. That leaves 16 which will make their way to work tomorrow.

The caramel sauce is used to bind the filling (which you can’t see under the icing) and it’s also in the frosting as well as dribbled over the top of the icing.

There’s a lot of caramel but you wont be overwhelmed by it. The chocolate cupcake is made with Dutch processed chocolate and it’s a rich chocolate flavour. The icing is made with cream cheese which should tone down the sweetness of the buttercream but it was still quite sweet.

Perfectly Chocolate Cupcakes – originally by Hershey’s

(makes 24-27 standard sized cupcakes though I got more. My cupcake liners have a 5cm base)

Ingredients

Cupcakes:

• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 3/4 cups all standard flour
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa (best quality available – I used Equagold)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup blue top milk
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil – I used Canola
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract – I used Hansells
• 1 cup boiling water

Filling:

• 2 Moro Gold MaxGold novelty bars
• 1/3 cup of Caramel Sauce (see this recipe for the sauce)

Decoration:

• 1/3 cup of Caramel Sauce

Frosting: – adapted from this recipe

• 113gm butter (set at room temp about 10 minutes, but should still be cool)
• 250gm cream cheese cut into cubes (directly from fridge)
• 1/3 cup caramel sauce
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 cups icing sugar
• 1 to 4 Tbs cream, or milk – as much as needed to get the right consistency for decorating

Instructions

Cupcakes:

• Line muffin tin with paper liners.
• Heat oven to 175 deg Celsius.
• In a large mixing bowl, stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
• Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla essence.
• Beat on medium speed for one minute.
• Stir in boiling water (the batter will be thin, don’t worry, this is right).
• Fill liners 2/3 full with batter.  (I put the batter into a large measuring cup then poured the batter into the liners.)
• Bake cupcakes for approximately 18-22 minutes.
• Cool completely on wire rack before frosting.

Filling:

• Chop the Moro bars into small pieces. I cut the bar in half lengthwise, then in half again, then chopped the lengths to make small pieces.
• Mix together the Caramel sauce with the chopped up Moro bars:

Frosting:

• Place butter in a large mixing bowl and blend slightly.
• Add cream cheese and blend until combined, about 30 seconds.
• Add the caramel sauce and mix until incorporated.
  Add vanilla extract and icing sugar and blend on low speed until combined. Increase to medium speed and beat until it begins to get fluffy.
  Slowly add the cream or milk, a little bit at a time until desired consistency is met. (Don’t add too much if you want the frosting to stay in place when piped on cupcakes.)
  Beat until fluffy, about 1 minute.
  Use at once or keep refrigerated. (This frosting will keep well in the refrigerator for several days, but you may need to re-beat it for the best texture.)

Assembly

• With a paring knife remove the centres in a cone type shape. Don’t cut to the very bottom, just enough to make a hole that you can fill with a little of the filling, less than a 1/2 teaspoon.
• Spoon the filling into the cavity.
• Pipe or spread the frosting on the cupcake, making sure you start wider than the cone you’ve cut and filled. I used a Wilton 1M tip.
• Place 1/3 of a cup of Caramel sauce into a Glad zip lock bag. Snip a very small piece from the corner for which you’ll drizzle the caramel over the frosting.

Can you believe that today was the first time in the 5 years of living in this house, with a brand new oven installed, that I baked with the “bake” function. I was hoping to see an improvement with the doming of cupcakes. It wasn’t to be. In fact they looked worse than usual. I wasn’t concerned because I knew the centres would be removed.

The texture of the cupcake is light but not crumbly. It will stick to cupcake liners so look out for greased liners. Otherwise you’ll end up like us nibbling away at the liner. And you don’t want to do that with company around.

The chocolate flavour was spot on. It was decadent without being over the top.

The cupcakes got the thumbs up from Mr Fussy and my MIL. And I enjoyed mine too!

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