CulturalFest Cupcakes - part 2

I told you about the cupcakes I made for CulturalFest last week, right? Read my previous, previous blog entry if you haven't. Long story short, so we promised an additional 1-dozen of cupcakes for future occasion to the auction winner, in addition to 1-dozen cupcakes they get on the day of. Anyways, I heard back from the cupcakes auction winner, and we happen to work on the same building! We've been communicating through email for her other 1-dozen cupcakes. We decided that I would make her 6 each of triple chocolate cupcakes and dulce de leche cupcakes.

I started with devil's food cake batter for the triple chocolate, and yellow butter cake for dulce de leche. Now here are the fun parts (these directions are for 12 cupcakes each):

For triple chocolate, I dipped the devil's food cupcake into warm chocolate ganache (1 cup bitter sweet chocolate, melted, and stir in 1/3 cup heavy cream), and frost them with chocolate ganache buttercream (the rest of the cooled ganache, whipped with 1/2 cup of softened butter and tiny pinch of salt). (left: cupcakes dipped in ganache before frosted; right: frosted cupcakes)




For dulce de leche, I cored each cupcake and filled they with caramel, and frost them with caramel swiss buttercream (recipe from Martha Stewart). From the same recipe, I made full recipe of caramel sauce, use 2/3 to fill the cupcakes, and 1/3 for buttercream (just third the rest of the recipe). Drizzle the leftover caramel sauce on top.