Impatient caramel mud cake --> caramel mud cupcakes!

I really love caramel, so I wanted to try making a caramel mud cake. However, I didn't want to cook it for 2 hours, which, I found, is what many recipes call for.

All the recipes I found also say to let the melted butter and sugar mix cool for 15 or even 20 minutes. That's OK when you've got time to burn, but sometimes when you're in a hurry this kind of instruction is just annoying.

My slight cheat? Rather than just letting it sit there cooling ever so slowly, fill a larger saucepan (or something) with tap water and sit the saucepan containing the hot mixture in the water. The heat will dissipate into the water and you'll see steam rising up. Stir the mixture to help it cool evenly. (I don't suggest using water colder than from the tap just because it might cool the edges too quickly, but you can try it if you're game.)

I ended up using a recipe from Best Recipes that only called for 60 minutes baking... but my oven usually takes longer than any recipe stipulates and I only had about an hour and a half total available for this baking session. So I decided it would have to be cupcakes again, and a couple of little gingerbread men silicone molds for the excess - cute.

Another beauty of this recipe is that a.) it does not require an electric mixer and, b.) you only have to wash up a single saucepan when you're done :)

The cupcakes only needed about half an hour in the oven. It was more like 40 minutes for the gingerbread men, but partly because they were on the "cool" shelf of my oven. So I successfully got my mud cake baked before I had to go out!

Best Recipes suggested a simple dusting of icing sugar to finish, which would have been impatient-person-friendly. But I didn't actually need the cakes until the next day, so when I got home later I made some caramel icing, using a Women's Weekly recipe (I didn't use the cake part of the recipe because it was one of the ones that needed to bake for 2 hours). This icing, as you'd expect, is a lot runnier than any buttercream, but I thought I'd try piping it anyway to see what would happen.

I didn't feel like dealing with a piping bag, so I got out this child-friendly "Cookie and Cupcake Decorating Kit," which was less than $10. The one annoying thing about using a bottle is that you have to get the icing into it through quite a small opening, but if you can get past that it's nice and contained - no icing coming out the wrong end of a bag.

I was a bit worried the icing would be so runny that it would drip down the sides of the cakes so I ended up putting it in the fridge for just a little while. This helped to thicken it a little, but keep an eye on it - I don't know how much it will harden if you forget about it!

The results were pretty good. The icing was soft but not running everywhere. You could manipulate it a little bit, but anything 3D (like a swirl) was out of the question - it all settles out relatively flat.

I played around with some embellishments of jersey caramel pieces. It's not entirely necessary of course, but I like how it looks, and the addition of a little chewy texture. These tasted FANTASTIC. Caramel wins again.

I also found another use for the white candy sections of the jersey caramels.

Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the (caramel-mud-cake-) gingerbread man...