Cake #27: Fail! with Delicious Caramel Fudge Frosting

So cake #27 was a complete bust. I would say it was inedible but since only five of the 24 cupcakes remain I think it's more a testimony to the fact that teenage boys will eat just about anything if it's covered in frosting.

So let's skip right over the oatmeal cupcakes and their tragic shortening based frosting and move on to one of my very favorite recipes in the whole world - Caramel Fudge Frosting.

This frosting is like piping brown sugar fudge on top of your cupcake. Yum!

I love the rich caramel taste, the silky texture and how you don't need to soften the butter. Remembering to take out butter is the bane of my existence. Seriously. Plus you only mess one pot and a spatula. Less dishes are always a good thing!

This is great on spice cake, brownies, eaten with a spoon, spread in a pan like fudge - it's just amazing. 

The light was bad and we're all sick again (yes, that 36 hours where we felt good was lovely. Wish it would have lasted a bit longer) so please excuse the horrible pictures. Hopefully you can glean from them the gist of this simple, versatile and dare I say essential recipe that we all love dearly.

Caramel Fudge Frosting

1 C packed brown sugar
½ C butter
¼ C milk
1 tsp vanilla
Icing sugar (amount varies)

Combine brown sugar, butter and milk in a saucepan; bring to boil over medium heat.
Cook and stir for two minutes.

Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Cool to luke warm. Now most normal people sit it on a trivet and wait an hour or so for the boiling candy to cool. I'm not a sit and wait sort of gal. Not even a little. So I take a bowl the pot will fit in and fill it with ice. As soon as the two minutes are up, sit the pot in the ice and stir like crazy. The bottom cools and thickens immediately so the stirring is important.

In just a few minutes you have a thick, cool base for your frosting.

Beat in icing (confectioners/powdered) sugar until it reaches spreading consistency. I like to beat it by hand until glossy as you do fudge, but if you like a slightly less silky texture you can just mix in icing sugar until it's thick.

Scrape into a zip loc bag

Pipe onto cupcakes

For anyone who's wondering, isn't she the chick who hates a lot of frosting? What gives??? Let me tell you, those cupcakes were foul, greasy, heavy, unfriendly bad-tasting atrocities. So I piped on the frosting in such a way that a person could pop it off, enjoy a nice little swirl of fudge and feed the cupcake to the dog.