Caramel Cake

04

Welcome to this year’s edition of Did Elly Successfully Make Tom’s Birthday Cake? Sure, sort of.

Tom’s birthday cakes and I have had a sordid past. There was the cake-turned-trifle incident. There was the didn’t-make-nearly-enough-frosting-and-ran-out-of-ingredients fiasco. There was the I’ve-tried-3-times-to-make-this-butterscotch-sauce-and-I-just-can’t-do-it-so-you-will-be-eating-your-cheesecake-plain problem. I’ve gotten better for the most part, though, so there’s that. I still can’t successfully frost a cake, but we’ll get there.

When Tom chose this cake I was both excited and nervous. Excited because caramel is clearly one of the most delicious things ever. Nervous because I don’t have the best track record with caramel. I asked Tom if I could decrease the recipe since it was just us eating it and it called for over 6 cups of sugar and a pound of butter. He said no. (I did end up decreasing the cake portion a bit; see notes in the recipe.)

The good (?) news is,  you get to beat the caramel with a wooden spoon for 20 minutes (I don’t even know how you “beat” something with a wooden spoon, btw) so you’ll get an arm workout and burn off approximately 1/10 of the slice of cake doing that.

The caramel takes forever to make. Luckily you don’t have to stand at the stove the entire time, only stirring it occasionally for the last hour and a half, but it takes time. Yes, I did say “the last hour and a half” (which actually took me more like 1h40m). The cake is a very straightforward recipe that yielded a very tasty and moist cake.

You will notice there are no pictures of the whole cake. That’s intentional. My cake looked nothing like the gorgeous picture on the original recipe. After I made the caramel I texted Tom and said, “Good news: I successfully made the caramel and didn’t burn down the house once! Bad news: Your cake is possibly the ugliest ever.

The cakes’ moisture led to them being a bit difficult to frost with the thickened caramel (crumbs and all of that). Plus the caramel color was not that pretty as it started to thicken. And, well, no matter how beautiful or easy to work with frosting is, it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know how to frost a cake, anyway.

BUT LISTEN. This cake is GOOD. I mean, how can this cake not be good? You are frosting it with caramel. Not caramel buttercream, not caramel sauce over regular frosting. STRAIGHT UP CARAMEL. It is possibly the richest thing I’ve ever made, and even I, who does not find things “too rich” pretty much ever could only eat a small slice (thank goodness, please remember aforementioned amount of sugar and butter). At a time, I mean. Obviously I ate this cake every night until it was gone.

 

tl;dr version: Great cake, amazingly delicious caramel “frosting,” ugly as sin, rich, fattening, worth it.

 

Caramel Cake

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4 thoughts on “Caramel Cake

  1. The closest I got to a birthday cake this year was a piece of cheesecake they brought to me for lunch after the baby was born. And I get the feeling that will be the last cake I ever have for my birthday 🙁

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