Daring Bakers Challenge- Caramel Cake

This month Daring Bakers challenge was a fun one. I even actually made the challenge earlier in the month, which seems to be a rarity lately. Our wonderful hosts for this months challenge were Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity, Alex of Blondie and Brownie and Jenny of Foray into Food. These wonderful foodies had us make Shuna Fish Lydon's caramel cake with caramelized butter frosting. Yum! My cake came out quite nicely and the cake itself has a real subtle hint of caramel. The frosting was very sweet to me. It almost overpowered the cake. I did not use all the icing on my cake and I still felt it was too sweet. I think the cake would be perfect with just a little powdered sugar over the top or even a dollop of whipped cream. I think the next time I make this cake( and I would definitely make it again), that is what I would do. Part of the recipe is to make a caramel syrup. I have found the syrup to be very useful. I used to on my Gingerbread cake with Sabayon and on a apple pie I made recently. Check out Shuna's blog, Eggbeater. You can find the recipe here from Bay Area Bites.




There was an optional second part to this challenge. It was to make Alice Medrich's recipe for Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels. The recipe is from her book Pure Desserts (Artisan Press, 2007). The recipe is also at Dolores blog. I am usually pretty good at making candy, but I must have turn my head away to just a minute before the caramel got to temperature, because it turned out really hard. Not the soft caramel I was expecting. It tasted good, if you let is completely melt in your mouth and not chew, least a tooth or filling would fall out.