I really suck at baking, like really bad. The last three times I've tried to make basic chocolate chip cookies not a single one has turned out right, so I don't know what I was thinking when I agreed to try to make these fancy Salted Caramel Apple Cider Cupcakes with my sister.
The original recipe is from Something Swanky
The actual cupcake muffins came out okay. The real problem we had was with the icing.
The recipe says to cream butter and shortening together then add powdered sugar and melted caramel. She warns in the recipe that blending the caramel into the icing can be "tricky". This should have been our first hint that we would screw it up.
The melted caramel was so hot that it was melting the butter as we tried to add it to the butter and shortening, (the recipe says that means your caramel is too hot).
So we waited a bit for the caramel to cool down. But then when we tried to add it to the butter/shortening combo, instead of blending in, the mixer was just dicing it into sticky chunks.
So then we heated it more and added a dab of milk as it cooled to keep it creamier and tried adding it to the butter/shortening combo again.
This time the caramel blended but the longer we beat the butter/shortening, sugar & caramel mixture, it looked less and less like icing. It became chunky and weird instead.
We went ahead and tried to put the chunky weird textured "icing" into the fancy icing thing (don't know what it's called) and tried to pipe it onto the cupcakes.
It didn't go so well because the texture of it just didn't work for pipping and little chunks of caramel kept getting stuck in the tip. So this is what we ended up with....
....as opposed to the beautiful cupcakes Something Swanky ended up with.
So what did I learn from this?
If you can't even bake basic chocolate chip cookies, do not attempt fancy cupcakes!
My sister said she did see a caramel syrup (like you might put on ice-cream) and wondered if that would have worked better for us than trying to use the real melted caramel. I don't know.
Have you had any baking failures lately? Please tell me I'm not the only one.
Lol- this is funny. I haven't documented any of my failures, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Pretty much every cake I make ends up half stuck in the pan. And then I break it apart trying to get it loose. Then I hide it with frosting.
ReplyDeleteI feel your pain. Oh I had a HUGE failure about 2 weeks ago, with a recipe for cupcakes I make all the time. What I learned? Don't assume you forgot the second cup of sugar just because the pile of sugar in the bowl looks small. I made 3 dozen -- THREE DOZEN -- cupcakes for my husband's bake sale, and accidentally put an entire extra cup of sugar in them. While they tasted good, they did not look very pretty. I refused to let him take them to work, so I had to remake the entire batch at 1 AM.
ReplyDeleteDid they at least taste good? As long as they tasted good, that's all that matters! lol
ReplyDelete