Caramel Cupcakes with Milk Chocolate Frosting

Sweet low carb caramel cupcakes topped with creamy sugar-free milk chocolate frosting. You will never believe healthy can taste THIS good!

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Sweet low carb caramel cupcakes topped with creamy sugar-free milk chocolate frosting. You will never believe healthy can taste THIS good!

The other day, a blogger friend and I were discussing just how easy it is to accidentally “copy” another blogger’s idea. Or more to the point, to seem like you are copying someone else’s idea when you post a similar recipe a short time after they do. The reality is, however, that you never saw their recipe and you both quite independently struck upon the same idea and executed it around the same time. This is far more common than you’d think and much of it has to do with the cyclical nature of food blogging. We’re all cranking out the seasonally appropriate recipes, seeing wonderful fresh produce at our farmer’s markets and dreaming up delicious meals for our families and yours. But how is it that we can sometimes hit upon the exact same idea, when there are so many ideas to be had? I blame Pinterest.

Pinterest is like one great big mood board for food bloggers. It’s so visually stimulating and there is so much to be seen, a great deal of which is food. You would think that the inspiration is virtually limitless. And yet, and yet…chances are many of us are seeing the same things as other food bloggers and drawing on the same sources of inspiration. We food bloggers are a supportive lot and we pin each other’s work and share each other’s content all over the place. And since we all follow each other on social media, we are seeing the pins of our friends, some of which they might be using as inspiration too. So it’s hardly any wonder that once in a while, we come up with seemingly identical ideas. A fellow low carb food blogger and I might be looking at almost the exact same pin at the exact same time, thinking to ourselves “I bet I could make a low carb version of that!”.

Now, if we are any good at what we do, our ingredients and methods should differ quite a bit. We should be drawing on our own knowledge base of baking and cooking techniques, so that the actual outcome is quite different, even if the idea is the same. Especially in low carb or grain-free baking, because most of us have developed our own unique methods for achieving results that rival conventional recipes. I’ve developed so many of my own ways of doing things, it’s really very obvious to me when someone has copied my recipe directly, with maybe just a few minor adjustments. But more often than not, I see a recipe I think was MY original idea and think it’s a copy, only to discover that the ingredients and instructions are very different. We just happened to have the same original idea!

However, this recipe? If you see it anywhere else, chances are high that someone really did copy me. When this idea occurred to me, I searched high and low for similar ones. I searched Pinterest and I searched Google. I saw plenty of caramel cakes, which were vanilla cake layers with caramel frosting. I saw plenty of chocolate cakes with caramel frosting and a few chocolate cakes with milk chocolate frosting. But I could not find one example of a caramel flavoured cake with milk chocolate frosting. So I was out on my own, in pure experimentation land.

And oh, what a delicious experiment it turned out to be. I used a batch of my sugar-free caramel sauce in the cupcakes themselves and Lily’s Creamy Milk Chocolate in the frosting. I wanted to swim in that frosting, it was so good. And together with the caramel cupcakes, it was pure low carb heaven.

5 from 8 votes

Caramel Cupcakes with Milk Chocolate Frosting

Servings: 12 cupcakes

Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Cook Time 30 minutes mins

Total Time 50 minutes mins

Sweet low carb caramel cupcakes topped with creamy sugar-free milk chocolate frosting. You will never believe healthy can taste THIS good!

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Ingredients

 

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Cupcakes:

• 2 cups almond flour
• 1/4 cup unflavored whey protein powder, or powdered egg whites
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 recipe sugar-free caramel sauce
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tsp caramel or vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp liquid stevia extract
• 1/3 cup almond milk or cashew milk

Milk Chocolate Frosting:

• 3 ounces 1 bar Lily's Creamy Milk Chocolate, chopped
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups powdered Swerve Sweetener
• 4 to 6 tbsp heavy whipping cream, room temperature
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

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Instructions

Cupcakes:

• Preheat oven to 325F and line a 12 cavity muffin tin with paper liners (I recommend parchment for easy release).
• In a large bowl, whisk together almond flour, whey protein, baking powder, and salt.
• Add caramel sauce, eggs, caramel or vanilla extract and nut milk until well combined.
• Divide batter among prepared muffin tin and bake 28 to 30 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.
• Remove and let cool completely in pan.

Frosting:

• In a heatproof bowl set over a pan of barely simmering water, melt chocolate until smooth.
• In a large bowl, beat butter with sweetener until combined (mixture will resemble crumbs). Add chocolate and beat until combined.
• Add 4 tbsp whipping cream and vanilla extract and beat until smooth. If frosting is too thick, add additional whipping cream until a spreadable consistency is achieved.
• Spread or pipe onto cooled cupcakes.

Notes

Serves 12. Each serving has 9.62 g of carbs and 4.16 g of fiber. Total NET CARBS = 5.46 g.

Food energy: 331kcal
Saturated fatty acids: 13.33g
Total fat: 28.80g
Calories from fat: 259
Cholesterol: 83mg
Carbohydrate: 9.62g
Total dietary fiber: 4.16g
Protein: 7.27g
Sodium: 314mg

Nutrition

Serving: 1cupcake | Calories: 331kcal | Carbohydrates: 9.62g | Protein: 7.27g | Fat: 28.8g | Saturated Fat: 13.33g | Cholesterol: 83mg | Sodium: 314mg | Fiber: 4.16g

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