These are similar to my most favorite cupcake, ever, the Fleur de Sel at Kara’s Cupcakes. Kara’s are better but if I wanted to put in the work I think I could come up with something pretty close. These have a chocolate cake base, with a salty caramel filling, fleur de sel on the salty caramel, a chocolate buttercream and more fleur de sel sprinkled on top. I love chocolate, I love caramel, I love salt, and I love all three together even more. Here are my notes/changes to make:

– I might use a different cake base, this one was a little hard to work with when trying to cut out the space in the top of the cake for the caramel. I’d like to use something less light and more dense, maybe.
– The caramel recipe says to use it immediately, but it really needs to be cooled a bit before adding the salt. And if you fill the cupcake with the hot caramel, the cake will just soak it all up. It needs to firm up a bit first.
– I wasn’t crazy about this buttercream and would use something from The Cake Bible next time. The flavor was fine, and it piped on okay, but it was a little soft and didn’t firm up enough.

• Chocolate Salted-Caramel Mini Cupcakes (Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes, p. 148)