HCB - Mud Turtle Cupcakes

The Heavenly Cake Bakers baked Mud Turtle Cupcakes this week. I tried to do the same. Yes, "tried"... After what happened tonight, I think every recipe should start with "don't bake this if you're in a hurry" :o) I guess those books wouldn't sell very well because we all bake in a hurry every once in a while. Right? But when you forget one of the most essential ingredients in the recipe, it's hard to "fix" the problem after you find out. Care to guess what I forgot? No, not the eggs, or the butter, or the leavening. Nope. Just the sugar!!! Yikes! Now these cupcakes really ARE going to taste liked mud :o(

I should have known something was wrong when I made half the recipe and only had 6.75 cupcakes instead of 8. I shrugged it off and baked them anyway. After 17 minutes in the oven, the cake tester came out clean so I figured they were done and took them out of the oven. I noticed they looked "different". The top was cracked (like those chocolate crinkle cookies). Hmmm... I go through the ingredients list in the book and that's when it hit me. The sugar! The superfine sugar! I remember thinking, let's skip the sugar for now (it's not like I'm going to forget the sugar, duh!), because I have to put some granulated sugar in the food processor to make "superfine sugar". That never happened and now here we are. After giving it some thought, I realized what I really baked today is something similar to biscuits. Chocolate biscuits! I tasted a crumb... ewww! But I wasn't ready to give up (yet).


 

While the cupcakes/biscuits were in the oven, I made a full batch of the caramel, which turned out great, by the way. I realized that the amount of sugar in the caramel was the exact amount that was missing from my cupcakes. So I thought, why not use all of the caramel to make "cupcake sandwiches"!

I cut each cupcake in half and spread a generous amount of caramel on the bottom half, and drizzled more on top of the other half, followed by a sprinkling of toasted sliced almonds. I took a bite, well, I took pictures first, and was pleasantly surprised. The cupcake was dark and fudgy. The caramel amount was just right, balancing the missing sweetness in the cupcake perfectly, while the crunch from the toasted almonds put it over the top (for me personally, anyway).

I'm really glad I didn't throw these away. Would I make them again without sugar? No. Not on purpose anyway. Was this a great learning/creative experience? You betcha! :o)

Final thoughts/tips:

• Some of the HCB-ers thought the cupcakes were a bit too crumbly, so I used bleached all-purpose flour instead of cake flour. I also substituted 10% of the butter with canola oil (by weight). I think that helped making my cupcakes fudgy. To make things easy, I added the cocoa to the dry ingredients instead of the wet ingredients.
• I'll have to remake these to see what they "really" taste like. They can only be better than what I tasted today, which was pretty yummy already.
• Don't forget to check out what other HCB-ers thought about these cupcakes (with sugar). You can find the blog roll HERE on Jenn's blog.