Decadent Dulce de Leche Cupcakes

Dulce de Leche Cupcake

I've been wanting to experiment with some new cupcake flavours for a while now. Last week I had a couple of orders to fill and had some left over chocolate cupcakes, so I decided to make the most of it. Caramel is a pretty common flavour in the dessert world, but I haven't actually tasted it in cupcake form. I've seen the many Dulce de Leche cupcakes on Flickr and turned to Google to do some investigating. Apparently Dulce de Leche is caramel made from sweetened condensed milk. Perfect! I love that sort of caramel, I remember my mum boiling up the cans of condensed milk to make caramel tarts when we were kids....yum.

So I set about researching how long to boil a can for (Mum couldn't remember). Turns out with the new pull top cans, you really shouldn't boil them at all, it can be done but be warned it could get messy. Eventually I decided that I wasn't in the mood to clean up a possible disaster so I went for a microwave method instead. All you do is pour into a glass microwave bowl, 1 can of sweetened condensed milk, 30g of butter and 3 tabsp of brown sugar. After you give it a stir, pop the bowl in the microwave for 1 min at Medium/50% power. Then stir again. Keep cooking for a 1 min at a time and stirring in between until the caramel reaches the consistency you desire. Easy as pie!

Back to the cupcakes, I added a nice dollop to the buttercream which made it a beautiful caramel flavour. I filled each cuppy with caramel, piped on a generous swirl of buttercream and drizzled chocolate ganache and caramel over the top. Absolute decadence!

What a lovely surprise inside!