I wanted to try a few new things, since I felt as though I was getting into a cupcake rut.
So, I tried this recipe for salted caramel buttercream. It was very nice. Maybe a little subtle with the caramel flavor, especial in comparison with the other cupcake I made.
Oh my gracious heavens, this cupcake was insane.
Okay, the cupcake on the left is a chocolate cupcake with the aforementioned salted caramel buttercream. It really was a nice cupcake.
The cupcake on the right is a lime-coconut cupcake with a lime buttercream.
The lime-coconut cupcake was just your standard 1-2-3-4 cake batter, with coconut milk substituted for the milk, a little lime zest and coconut extract added with the liquid ingredients, and about half a cup of shredded coconut added at the end. It was pretty subtle in both the lime and the coconut departments.
I may as well have made plain white cake, because it was the buttercream that did it.
I made my usual French buttercream recipe.
Then I zested and juiced two limes. I added the zest to the finished buttercream, which made for a very subtle, but very nice, vaguely lime-ish flavor. If you wanted to stop there, you could. No one would say, "Oh, this is lime!" But everyone would say, "Oh, this is good! What's that flavor in the background?"
Well, then I took the juice and boiled it down until it was syrupy. I added the syrup to the buttercream.
It was yowza.
I probably would use a smidge less of the condensed lime juice next time. It was perhaps a little too assertively lime. Or if I did it this way again, I would put it on a little more flavorful cupcake--something that could really stand up to the lime.
And it did make the buttercream a little soft. It started to slump pretty quickly in our warmer-than-room-temperature kitchen.
But I will definitely do buttercream this way again. Just not until I lose the seventy-eight pounds I gained "sampling" and "testing" this one. ("You know, it's for company. I'd better make sure it really does taste okay.")
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