Chocolate caramel cupcakes with caramel buttercream - I should Cocoa

It's time (well, just in the nick of time actually!) for this month's I should Cocoa entry. The host this month was Chele over at Chocolate Teapot and her choice of ingredient to combine with the requisite chocolate was caramel - yum!
All sorts of lovely ideas sprang into my mind, but as is ever the case at the moment time ran away with me and I ended up making cupcakes for this challenge. Not that this is a bad thing in it's own right, but hopefully next time I'll branch out into something different.

This is my own recipe so here goes:

Chocolate and caramel cupcakes with caramel buttercream
Ingredients
110g softened butter
120g light muscovado sugar
105g golden caster sugar
2 large eggs
150g self raising flour
125g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
50g/ml caramel sauce
50-60ml milk, at room temperature
80g dark chocolate, chopped (well, the rest of the bar was nibbled.....)

For the buttercream
40g butter
60ml/4tbsp milk
145g light muscovado sugar
about 200g icing sugar

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with liners and do the same for a mini muffin tin. You may not get quite this many, it depends how large you make the big cupcakes as to how much mixture is left for little ones.

- Cream the butter and sugars until well combined.

- Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.

- Add the flour and mix to combine then add the vanilla, caramel sauce and chopped chocolate and mix in well.

- Divide the mixture between the cases and bake in the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes.

- Remove and allow to cool on a wire rack.

- For the buttercream melt the butter, milk and light muscovado sugar in a saucepan over a low heat.
- Bring to the boil and allow to boil for 1 minute. Add half of the icing sugar and allow to cool a little.
- Add the remaining icing sugar and immediately use to frost your cupcakes. If you don't use it straightaway it will set pretty solid and be impossible to spread!
- Decorate with chocolate as desired.

I tried to marble the caramel syrup in, rather than mixing it completely but as this isn't obvious from the final cupcakes, I wouldn't bother, it's easier to just mix it in well.

My slight confession with these cupcakes is that although it's possible to make your own caramel to use in them, I had a jar of bought caramel half used up and wanted to continue to use that up. However, I did make the caramel for the frosting and it's such a lovely thing to make - the smells wafting up from my pan as I boiled the sugar and butter to make the caramel were luscious - I'm sure it would have been delicious poured over icecream just as it was. Luckily for my cupcakes, colleagues and this challenge I resisted the temptation to devour it all and turned it into icing. Because it's made with light muscovado sugar it's a lovely dark caramelly colour too. I couldn't decide whether to make chocolate or caramel frosting (after all it is a chocolate and caramel challenge!) but decided to major on the caramel aspect this time. Yum, glad I did because I much prefer this frosting to chocolate buttercream.

My colleagues loved them. As for me, well, they're ok. I'm just not sure about the texture of the cupcakes this time round. They're not as light and moist as I had hoped but good all the same.