Daring Bakers: Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting

So I'm slightly late. Only a few hours. Call it fashionably late. And I had good reason. My parents just left and I didn't have a whole lot of baking time when they were here. Thanksgiving was enough cooking for me. I'll probably post more about that later.

Reason #2 is because today is my birthday. Birthday's are supposed to have cake. Thanksgiving has turkey; 4th of July has burgers; birthday's have cake. Some things just go together. So I figured I'd make this cake for my birthday. I know, kinda sad to be making your own cake for your own birthday and eating it at home by yourself but oh well. I still want cake. People just for the sake of saying you are not alone, not so much.

Now I was a little worried because I read about some of the failures other people had and having to remake stuff to make it work and all. But I devoutly stuck with making it on my birthday. Besides, I didn't have anything else planned and that and cleaning up the mess my parents left and making some bread to make sandwiches with the leftovers would fill my day.

Anyway, off I went to make the cake. This month's challenge, in case you didn't read the title for some reason, is Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting. The recipe was written by Shuna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater who I guess has some fancy pants bakery in the Bay Area that I'll probably never get to actually try, which is also kinda sad but besides the point. It is was chosen by Dolores, Alex, Jenny, and Natalie though you should really go do the Daring Bakers Blogroll if you want to see more. Hopefully I'll still get counted; they said you had to have links and stuff in your post but they never said they were gonna check the date although the date is obviously important.

This recipe was clearly written for me because it said to start by having a bowl of ice water ready in case you burn yourself. I followed this step. Woohoo! Look, I actually followed part of the recipe! This is good for me. And I didn't even need it. I used the bowl of ice water to cool down the syrup so I could get going on the rest of the cake even though I was waiting on everything to come to room temperature but I was impatient. I wouldn't recommend doing that because it got too cold and then I had to warm it back up to room temp while whipping it up.

It didn't take anywhere near as long as I thought it would. It took me 4 hours to do everything, which included letting things cool and making bread (that'll maybe be a separate post depending on how it comes out). So this worked out really well for me.

I'm not posting the recipe. If you go to pretty much any of the links at the top of the post you can get the recipe. I actually followed it pretty well this time.

Here's the start of the Caramel Syrup.


Here it is cooling. Nice and golden brown. It looks darker in real life. Like a Grade B maple syrup. And thick like Aunt Jemima's syrup, not maple syrup. It's got a dark really caramelly flavor; dark is the best way I can describe it. I still have about a cup worth of it left. Any thoughts on what I should do with it?


Here is the cake, done baking before icing. The texture was nice and delicate. I lined the pan with parchment paper before baking. I find that's the best way to get it out of the pan. No matter how much I try to butter and flour or cooking spray or anything else it newe seems to work quite right. Parchment me-proofs it.

The flavor is quite sweet. Which will be interesting with the super sweet frosting.


This is the finished cake. This is actually pretty for me. I know, not pretty for Daring Bakers' standards but pretty for me.