Devil's Food Cupcakes with Salted Dulce de Leche Frosting

So apparently Shortcakes has gone more international than I ever imagined, so welcome to all of my international readers :) It's cool to think that someone across the world may have made one of my recipes...
This installment: Devil's Food Cupcakes with Salted Dulce de Leche Frosting. AND they're really easy to make!! The inspiration for these actually came from a need to use up some sweetened condensed milk that I mistakenly bought for some homemade fudge when what I really needed was evaporated milk. Doh! These were my "progress cupcakes" because I have been buying some tools I didn't have in the past which made my cupcake baking so much easier (I'll post a little blurb at the end of this post with my experiences with my new stuff). I also feel like I've gotten a much better feel for the process and what goes into a good recipe. AND I made them the weekend of my first round of Clomid pills. So not only am I progressing with my cupcake making, but baby making as well ;) Things are much easier with a little help sometimes...
If you're making the dulce de leche "frosting," skip down to the recipe for that and start it before you make the cupcakes. You'll need about 4-8 hours for this part (don't be scared! it's super easy to do!) so start it well in advance of the actual cakes.
So for the cakes, I reverted back to the Devil's Food Cupcakes recipe but I decided to tweak it Shortcakes-style. So here's my version of the recipe...

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup sour cream
1 cup milk
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
2 tsp vanilla
2 eggs, room temperature

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Sift together flour, cocoa powder, and baking soda and set aside. Pour milk into a bowl with the sour cream and set aside. Beat butter until soft and smooth, add sugar and beat until fluffy (when using sour cream in a cupcake recipe, the more you beat the butter and sugar together, the fluffier the cupcakes will be. Conversely, the less you beat them, the more dense they will be.). Add eggs, one at a time, beating to combine in between. Add vanilla and beat until incorporated. Add the dry and wet ingredients in the following order, beating until just combined in between each addition: one third of the flour mixture, then one half of the milk/sour cream mixture, then another third of the flour mixture, the rest of the milk/sour cream, then the rest of the flour mixture. Fill cupcake liners about 2/3 full and bake 15-20 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center of cupcakes comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack before frosting.

*I filled them about 3/4 full and they ended up being quite huge. They also spilled over the tops of the liners about halfway through and I thought I had a complete disaster on my hands because, at that point, they were really soupy looking. It gave me terrible flashbacks to my Easy Bake Oven disaster as a child when I (ironically) was making a chocolate cake and accidentally used the tablespoon measure for the water instead of the teaspoon measure. It ended up being a soupy sticky mess, but I learned a valuable lesson about double checking measurements and recipes. So needless to say, when they were spilling over but not firming up, I thought I had ruined a batch of cupcakes for the first time ever. Oh the horror!! But my fears were unwarranted, because they turned out just fine. Big, but fine. And big in this case was no problem because I took most of them to the fire station for hubby and the men/woman of station 22 to feast on. They were firefighter sized :) So here they are pre-"frosting:"

So you can obviously see that they are accidentally jumbo. But it worked out well for the "frosting" in this case because there was more surface area. If they were smaller, I would probably ended up putting on a thicker coating of the dulce de leche, which would have rendered them too dulce-de-leche-ey.

Now for the easiest part: the dulce de leche.

Ingredients:
One to two cans of sweetened condensed milk
Water

There are a few ways to do this. The way I did it was to take the label and the top off the can of milk and cover with tin foil. I then placed the can and tin foil into a crock pot and added water until it reached just below the top of the can. I set the crock pot on high for about four hours (low on eight works is an alternative if you have the time or want to make it overnight), checking occasionally to make sure the water level didn't drop too much. The dangerous part is getting the can out of the crock pot... I used some tongs but didn't have a very good grip, and the can fell into the water, tipped over, and about 1/4 of the dulce de leche was ruined. I thought all of it was ruined, but I was able to salvage 3/4 of it. I made another can after the first one (although you can make two at a time if your crockpot is big enough) because I realized after making the first that I was going to need another to top all of the cupcakes. The second time around, I got a little wiser and removed as much of the water as I could using a measuring glass before lifting the can out with the tongs. I then placed the cans into the refrigerator on top of a towel (because the cans were really hot) to let them cool, although it may be best to let them sit out for a few hours to come to room temperature, I just didn't have that much time.

The other way you can do this is to put the whole can, minus the label but with the lid intact, into the crockpot and fill with water so the can is submerged completely. Cook 4 hours on high or 8 hours on low and remove after the water cools to room temperature. Apparently the can will not explode as long as the water level stays above the can, the can is put into cold or room temperature (not hot) water initially, and you wait to remove the can until the water cools off, but I didn't want to risk having a dulce de leche missile in my kitchen. So I opted for the safer method. It should be noted, however, that the method I used caused the milk to overflow a bit and get into the water, which wasn't very pleasant looking but didn't affect anything.

Once the dulce de leche cooled enough, I spooned it onto the center of the cupcake and spread it. It was still a tiny bit warmer than room temperature so it ended up spreading itself a little bit, but it made for a cute cartooney kind of look. I then topped them with a swirl of chocolate and a dusting of sea salt:

See how they look kind of cartooney? I thought they were cute :) My husband was intent on eating at least two that night, but said they were a little too rich to eat more than one due to the "frosting." However, he doesn't have a big sweet tooth and I think others ate more than one. I had one as well and thought they were darned good. The sea salt was a great touch and I highly recommend it... when I brought the rest into work the next day, I put a sign on them to encourage them to be eaten and I made sure to label them "chocolate cupcakes with dulce de leche and sea salt." I wanted to make sure everyone knew the sea salt was intentional. I was only in the office for a short period of time that day and I didn't see any left the next day, so I guess that means they were all consumed. And hopefully happily at that.

As promised- my new cupcake baking tools/tricks: My stepmother-in-law spoils me, and bought me a new stand mixer for Christmas. Check this baby out:

It really is a fancy piece of machinery and I'm so in love with it. And I finally got myself a sifter. It's such a necessity and I don't know how I lived so long without it. I also invested in a cookie scoop. Or maybe it's an ice cream scoop? I've seen it described both ways... but it's basically one of those scoops that has the handle that you squeeze and this little metal bar scrapes across the scoop to ensure that everything comes out nicely. So I now use that to put the batter into the cupcake liners and it's amazing how much easier and cleaner this process is now. I also purchased another cupcake pan so I can bake more than just twelve at once which saves me a lot of time. So it was a much more pleasant experience this time all the way around...