Hot Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcakes with a Caramel Filling

Woo! This recipe was an exciting and exhausting experiment for myself. I wanted to really dive into fall-themed recipes, and the first thing that came to mind was of course: hot chocolate. I love to make hot chocolate with cinnamon and caramel on top, so transforming that into a cupcake sounded like the perfect match. Many recipes that are hot chocolate flavored tend to be a chocolate cake instead of the frosting. This tends to be a little sweet, so I thought to switch it around and do a caramel based cake with hot chocolate starring in the frosting.

This is my first recipe where I experiment with a filling, making my own base cake from scratch, as well as my first scratch/personal frosting recipe! It was extremely daunting at first but the results turned out great!

So how I started a recipe from scratch was researching what makes a base of both parts of a cupcake: the cake and the frosting. Adding the filling was just a fun touch! I wanted to make the cake a pretty neutral flavor as I knew that the caramel and the frosting were going to be pretty sweet. The result was almost a muffin-like cinnamon cake, which was subtle yet complimentary.

Tip: Beat the butter and sugar for at least 4-5 minutes to make a super light and fluffy batter that'll create "holes" in the cake, this is personally what I prefer over a dense cake.

Also, layering the wet ingredients back and forth with the milk and sour cream mixture helps develop and blend into the dry ingredients without clumping.

For this recipe I used a silver foil paper liner to compliment the "hot chocolate" vibe!

Letting them cool completely is extremely important for cutting out the hole for the filling. If you don't, the cake is more likely to crumble as you're cutting it, making it a little more messy.

I'm sure with this frosting recipe you could interchange the flavor of hot chocolate that you could make, I chose the "Cozy Christmas" one, which was one that I got from Target about a year ago, and I hope they bring it back. I would compare it to a fudge-y hot chocolate, or something along the lines of "double chocolate".

Also, this whipped cream based hot chocolate is absolutely addicting, and I'm excited to test this in other recipes!

Until you add in the chocolate mixture, the base is very dry, don't worry! It whips into something more decadent like this! The more you mix it, the fluffier it gets.

This part is best used with a skinny tipped knife, I used a cheap steak knife we had gotten about a year ago at Dollar Tree, its serated which helps carve out the hole. The caramel is spooned in with a teaspoon!

I piped with a simple star tipped cake tip, and did a spiral design and dropped it on the tip. In the future, I would possibly decorate this with white sprinkles, or even snowflake sprinkles, which should hopefully be more around

holiday season.

The feeling should be suspended in the middle, and if the top of hole fit perfectly, then it should sit right in the middle! As someone who doesn't like frosting, as well as super sweet and dense cupcakes, this was an absolute treat. I absolutely adore this and I'm super impressed with the results of my first 100% scratch made recipe. I can't wait to tweak this around, maybe even make a peppermint hot chocolate version! Excited to see how y'all feel about this recipe, and how it tastes!

#baking #cupcake #chocolate #cinnamon