May's flavour of the month is the delightfully sickly Caramel Crunch cupcake. A very moist, lightly caramel flavoured sponge, topped with an American-style brown butter and caramel frosting. Oh my it's sweet, but in a very good way.I've developed this flavour for my Nanny (ie my grandmother, before you think I'm super-posh and had a nanny as a child...), who is visiting this month with my Mum and Dad - yippee!
A brown butter frosting is an adaptation of a standard butter icing. First melt the butter in a pan until it goes brown and takes on a nutty caramel taste. My recommendation would be use a low-medium heat, and it will take about 5-10 minutes (nb you must strain the melted butter to take out any burnt solids - using a seive was fine enough for my liking, but you might want to use a fine mesh one.) Then simply add sifted icing sugar until you get the right consistency for frosting - swooshing, piping, eating off your finger or whatever. (You'll need roughly 100g of butter and 500-600g icing sugar for 12 large cupcakes.)
You can also add flavouring, but I'd stick to caramel, toffee types of flavours - it would work really well for a maple syrup frosting for example. For this cupcake I included a couple of tablespoons of homemade caramel syrup. Mmmmmm. Shame I've already eaten all the test cakes...
