Delicious Butterscotch Cupcakes

As I posted yesterday, on Sunday we had some friends over for lunch and as such, a dessert was certainly in order. Luckily I came across these cupcakes last week and they had my name all over them - cake, whipped cream with mascarpone, butterscotch, and toffee?? Yes, please! I'm not going to lie, they were a bit of a process, but honestly I would do it all again. They were really quite delicious.

It all starts with making the toffee. I have yet to find toffee on a regular basis here, so I made it. I used the same recipe as I did when I made the toffee to top the chocolate cake with dulce de leche, I just left the hazlenuts out. You start by melting butter.

Then add the sugar and corn syrup. Once it caramelizes, add in the baking soda and salt.

Then pour it out onto parchment to let it harden.

Finally just chop it up and the topping is ready.

The next step is to make a rum syrup. Basically you make a simple syrup and then add in some rum. This sounded and smelled delicious, but being the airhead that I currently am, I totally forgot to use it on the cupcakes. It's still sitting in my fridge in case anyone wants to pour it onto something.

Next up is the butterscotch sauce. Melt the butter and then stir in the brown sugar.

Once it has dissolved, add in the cream and whisk it all up.

Then let it boil for about five minutes until it has thickened up.

Mine bubbled like crazy - for a while I was afraid it would boil over, but it didn't. Thank goodness, because that would have been one HUGE mess.

Then just whisk in the vanilla and salt and let it cool as it turns back into a sauce. So delicious!!

Next are the cupcakes. Whisk up your dry ingredients.

Then chop up a ton of butter. Prepare some eggs and milk. You are supposed to add lemon to the milk at the last minute, but I didn't have any lemon juice and I figured you just needed to spoil the milk a bit, so instead I used vinegar.

Mix the butter into the dry ingredients piece by piece. I'm not going to lie, this made a mess. I had butter and flour flying about the kitchen. I was ready to just give up.

I kept on, however, and it ended up working out quite well. I did have a good amount of clean up to deal with while these were in the oven though.

Next you add in the milk/lemon/vinegar situation and mix it up. This is where everything started to take shape.

Finally you add in the eggs and like magic, it turns into cupcake batter. Wahoo!!

I have about a million different cupcake liners, each with just a few left, so I ended up doing a few of each, essentially using up most of those that were nearly gone.

The last step is to bake them. The recipe called for 13 minutes, but mine needed about 18. I'm not sure if my oven temperature got off while I was putting them in or what, but 13 minutes certainly would not have cut it for mine. If I had been paying attention, this is when I would have used the rum syrup. Next time, maybe?

The last step is to assemble these bad boys. I found that when I just put the butterscotch sauce into the middle of the cupcake, it couldn't hold much. Instead I put it in three spots. The way they turned into little faces gave me the giggles. My favorite was easily the one in the bottom left corner - he just looks so happy!!

Once that was done, I worked on the whipped cream. Whip the cream and powdered sugar until you get firm peaks.

Then fold in the mascarpone and be super happy because once you have this all cleaned up, you are done washing bowls and pots and beaters!

I don't know why, but we do not have an ice cream scooper in this house. Weird, I know. So instead I used a spoon. Some looked cuter than others, but what can you do?

Next I added the toffee pieces on top.

And then drizzled on a circle or eight of butterscotch sauce. We had these for dessert, of course, and they were really, really good. Y says they made his favorites list - yay! I agree with him. As above, they are quite a process, but you can make the toffee, rum syrup, and butterscotch sauce a few days ahead. I did the cupcakes the night before and was only left with the whipped cream and assembly the morning of. Also, it says that the whipped cream must be used immediately, but there was no way we were going to finish that many cupcakes between the four of us, so I only made a few that first day and put the whipped cream into the fridge. Over the next three days, I pulled it out to make the portions that we would eat (or those that I gave away) and for the most part it was fine. The last three ended up being a bit droopy and melty, but the taste was the same - delicious.

A few that I gave away were ones that I baked in the tulip papers. Eeek! I think they looked so cute!

I was lucky that I had turquoise ribbon laying about, because I love red and turquoise together. I think it added to the sweetness of these little guys.