Sticky toffee pudding cupcakes with salted caramel icing...

I had been invited to the launch party of the Great Pink Bake Off, a charity event in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer.  It was to be held in Edinburgh in an early evening on a Thursday.  I thanked the PR lady for inviting me, but explained that as I live and work in Dundee it simply wasn't feasible for me (time and childcare issues basically).  I passed the information on to my colleagues and one was able to attend.  She brought me back a goodie bag, and I set to making these Mark Greenaway Sticky Toffee pudding cupcakes for the adults coming to our tea party (the kids got the personalised mini cupcakes).

As you can see, the recipe was a bit of a palaver, with lots of different little sections to combine.  I hadn't yet made a sticky toffee pudding, despite it being one of my favourite desserts, so I quite enjoyed doing all the necessary parts.

I found making the salted caramel sauce a little tricky.  It seemed to go from white sugar to a dark brown sauce very quickly, and tasted bitter to me.  I asked Mr Becca to try it, and whilst he agreed it tasted good it also seemed burnt/bitter to him.  When making up the icing, the required amount of cream cheese was nowhere near enough for a piping consistency, so I added more cream cheese and far less caramel sauce. Then I felt I had to add in way more icing sugar to make it sweeter.  By the time I'd played about with ingredients to achieve consistency, I ended up having to throw out a fair bit of the caramel sauce...

The end result looked and tasted good though.  The combination of the delicious sponge, with the slightly bitter-sweet icing and drizzled sauce worked really well.  All the adults loved them, and even some of the kids tried them too.  I took the spares in to work the next day, and the colleague who'd been to the launch party and tried the original version deemed them a good copy indeed!  Go Becca  :)