Daring Bakers - Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting

This month's Daring Bakers' Challenge was all about sugar. I was a little uneasy about baking it since it required making a caramel sauce. I've tried making caramel in the past with some not very good results & a nasty pan to clean up. But the Daring Bakers is all about challenging yourself to try new things so I went ahead & dove in.

Actually, making the caramel sauce that gets used in both the cake & the frosting was a lot easier than I expected & I was quite please with my results. I decided to just do half of the recipe, since there is only two of us, & make it into a two layer 4.5-inch cake. I actually ended up having enough cake batter to make the cake & two cupcakes. We ate the cupcakes out of the oven without any frosting & let me tell you this is one good cake! It's a little denser than some cakes & quite moist.

The frosting is made with brown butter, a flavor we just love. Many other Bakers thought it was too sweet but we didn't think so. I added a little extra sugar like a few people suggested & the final flavor was like that of a salted caramel, yum! To decorate the cake I put my caramel sauce back on the stove & let it cook a little while longer. I then drizzled the hot caramel on parchment paper to create different shapes. Once the caramel sauce cooled I had hard candy shapes to use on the cake.

You can get the recipe by Shuna Fish Lyndon on Bay Area Bites. Thanks to Dolores at Culinary Curiosity, Alex at Blondie & Brownie and Jenny at Foray into Food for hosting what has probably been my favorite challenge yet. Natalie at Gluten-a-Go-Go helped out with making the recipe work for Alternative Bakers.