Week 12: Apple Cupcakes with Caramel Frosting

I'll save everyone a little suspense. The score is now Cupcakes: 2, Kate: 0.

An apple cupcake a day...would require a lot of baking!

My first attempt at making cupcakes for the club did not go perfectly. So I was really hoping to totally redeem myself with these apple cupcakes. I measured everything precisely, even checking my calculations for doubling the ingredients on my calculator. I had enough of each ingredient, without having to shop for anything special. My husband was a whiz at dicing the apples. This was going to be awesome.

The recipe said to mix the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately, then add the apple chunks to the wet ingredients before mixing in the dry. I accidentally mixed the wet and dry ingredients before adding the apples. No matter—this wasn't going to break my stride.

Regardless of my error in ingredient order, the batter for these cupcakes was awesome. It smelled and tasted great—so much cinnamon and nutmeg. While I was mixing it up, I had an idea that the batter might be good just baked over apple slices; kind of like an apple cobbler/cake hybrid. This time, though, I stuck with the cupcake paradigm. I put the cupcakes in the oven and asked my husband to listen for the beep. Meanwhile, I went outside to do some gardening (which, I have to say, I am likewise semi-inept at).

Cupcakes gone wrong.

About 25 minutes later, my husband came outside. I asked him if the buzzer had gone off. He said it had, and then he hesitated. "The cupcakes," he said. "They just don't look…right." I asked if they'd burned. "No, they didn't burn. But they look kind of like—peanut brittle or something." Peanut brittle? How could my cupcakes look like peanut brittle? Surely he was mistaken.

He was right. The cupcakes had vacated their individual cups, spreading across the muffin tin in some kind of evil, baked-on blob. I mean this thing was baked on there. It was super tough to get off the muffin tins. I guess the cupcakes had overflowed their liners and baked onto the tin, but what was left in the liner had also fallen.

I started again, this time mixing the ingredients in the right order. I don't think that made a difference. But the cupcakes fell, again. I just don't know what I did wrong. My fellow cupcake clubbers—they're too nice, really—said it could have been because a storm front moved through the same time the cupcakes were baking.

Behind the scenes of a
cupcake photo shoot.

And I still had to make the frosting. I was worried about the frosting. I remembered the difficulty the maple brown butter frosting posed a few weeks ago. It turned out pretty well. I thought it might not set up right—after it cooled, it was still a little runny. But I put it in the fridge overnight, and it set up right. I don't normally like caramel, but it ended up being one of my favorite frostings.

Overall, I thought the cupcake was pretty good. I think I liked the batter better than the end product. I think it might work better as a cake or maybe as a muffin than as a cupcake. I'm sorry my cupcake posts always turn in to such a story. It's just that I am truly, apparently, incapable of making a cupcake, and have an inescapable compulsion to explain my efforts. But, I'm looking forward to my next attempt!