Dark Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes

Dark Chocolate Salted Caramel Cupcakes
To make them at home, you’ll need 4 components on hand: fresh, completely cooled chocolate cupcakes, caramel sauce (preferably homemade), chocolate ganache and some fancy sea salt.

For the chocolate cupcakes, any chocolate cupcake recipe you’re familiar with will do.
For the dark chocolate ganache, I have to admit that I don’t really use a recipe. But when I made this batch of dark chocolate salted caramel cupcakes, I did the following: I simmered 1 cup of heavy cream over medium heat, then I whisked in about 8 ounces of really dark Ghiradelli chocolate chips and about 1 1/2 tablespoons of chocolate liqueur. I whisked it all together until the chocolate completely melted and the mixture was smooth. Then I let it cool for about an hour, until it was thick enough to spread on the cupcakes with a spoon…but not so thick that it didn’t drip just a little once on the cupcakes.

I happened to have some nice French fleur de sel around for the salt part of these cupcakes. Any good, flaky sea salt should work for this.

Just for reference, I made 24 regular sized cupcakes. If you make the full batch of caramel sauce, you’ll have lots left over. Half a batch should be more than enough if you don’t want extra. The ganache I described above was ample for the cupcakes with very little left over.

To assemble the cupcakes, cut a small piece out of the center of each cupcake. Mine were probably close to an inch in diameter and about the same depth. I think they sell fancy cupcake coring contraptions but all I used was a small paring knife. Insert the knife at a slight angle to core the cupcakes. Once you do it a few times, you’ll get the hang of it and it goes quite quickly. Since you’ll be filling these cupcakes, cut the bottom of each core piece off just a little bit so that there will be room for it to fit back into the cupcake once it’s filled with caramel sauce.



Spoon or pipe caramel sauce into each cupcake. Sprinkle a pinch of sea salt over the caramel in each cupcake. Cover each cupcake with the pieces you removed earlier. If the pieces don’t fit perfectly, it’s okay as the ganache will cover up any imperfections.



Spoon or spread a generous bit of chocolate ganache onto each cupcake and sprinkled another pinch of sea salt on top of the ganache. Note: If the ganache hasn’t set enough, it will drip all over the place. If this happens, wait for the ganache to set a little more and proceed to eat the messy cupcake immediately.