Spiced Apple Cupcakes with Caramel Buttercream

It's true that it is now November 5th and I'm just posting my final October posts. There's only so many hours in the day and those blog posts just didn't fit in this past week or so. Sorry! I have been doing a lot of fun planning for the blog and the YouTube channel, so stay tuned for that. 

Today's recipe is for Spiced Apple Cupcakes with a Caramel Swiss Meringue Buttercream, which is really just me picking and choosing from the great work of other people and sharing the results with you. First up is Martha Stewart's Apple Cupcakes, I followed her recipe pretty closely, except I used chopped apples, not shredded and added ginger, cloves, etc. to make it more spicy. I was a little depressed when these cupcakes cake out the oven because the centers fell and looked rather sad. They were moist and tasty, but didn't have the look I wanted. I remedied this situation by filling the center of each cupcake with a caramel sauce that I read about on Love & Sugar Kisses. Then I topped them with a swirl of Caramel Swiss Meringue made by adding some of the caramel sauce to Joe Pastry's plain recipe (minus about 1/2 pound of butter). Because I didn't craft this recipe myself, I've included links to the ones used and will not write out the steps below. I will, however, include the delicious looking photos from the process. Enjoy!

the ingredients

creaming the butter and sugar

about to add the eggs

light and creamy with those eggs

adding the apples and flour

in the tin

fallen in the center, but still tasty

boiling the sugar for the caramel sauce

caramel color, ready for the cream

a beautiful caramel sauce (the best thing I've made?)

whipping up the egg whites

adding the butter

beautiful buttercream! (also the best thing I've ever made?)

filling the cupcakes with caramel

the finished product

a look inside

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