The Scent of Green Bananas in The Cupcake Bakeshop

I have a lot of pictures lying around from before we left Denmark - including these, of some cupcakes I served for my brothers birthday in late February. It's not so much a recipe, but more of an idea. It sprang from the fabulous White Chocolate and Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Santos' pictures and description persuaded me to make for a DwB-session a year ago - Boy, was it delish!

And then, browsing around Chockylit's blog, as I do from time to time (and watch out with that - clicking on Chockylit's pictures could have you running to the kitchen within seconds, thinking nothing but cupcakes, cupcakes, CUPCAKES!!!:-)), the idea emerged of taking the flavors from the cheesecake, and turning them into a cupcake. I haven't been able to find that many recipes using dulce de leche as an ingredient in, say, cupcakes, which has annoyed me a bit. So, using the approach Chockylit's has to a lot of her cupcakes (a base-recipe for the cake, then some sort of filling, and then a lavish frosting) and Santos' cheesecake recipe as a blueprint, the Dulce de Leche filled Blackbottom Cupcakes with White Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting was born. Some name, eh?!

I used a recipe for blackbottom cupcakes from Baking by Flavor. Let them cool, then cut out little cones from the top (ate those - wouldn't want to waste them, you know?) and filled the hole with dulce de leche.

On top of that, I piped a cream cheese-white chocolate-icing sugar frosting. Now, I'll have to work on the amounts in the frosting, and I'd probably use a butter-cream cheese frosting approach, to get a frosting that would hold it's shape better - but the flavors together where GREAT! I guess you could go for a more dense, chocolatey type of cupcake-bottom - I wanted the ever-so-slightly bitter taste of the blackbottom one, because face it, dulce de leche is tooth-achingly sweet. Anyways, just wanted to pass the idea on (and remember a bit what it was like to have homemade treats - sniff!! Oh dear how I miss my oven!):-)

A little blurry, but you get the idea, right?