Caramel Pecan Cupcakes

Yesterday evening Matt and I went out for dinner at Radial Cafe.  The restaurant had recently offered a deal where for $35, you could buy a dinner for two that included two alcoholic beverages, an appetizer, two entrees, and a dessert.  What a ton of food for such a small amount of money!  Because I have been curious about their dinner menu, I jumped on the deal asap.  Needless to say, we didn't eat much for breakfast or lunch yesterday in preparation for our evening feast.  

Although everything we got for dinner was delicious, one of the standouts of the night was the praline caramel cake.  We got the dessert to-go because we were so stuffed by the time we got to the dessert  option.  Later in the evening when we finally did try to cake, Matt and I found ourselves fighting over the last bite.  It was that good.  On the way from church today, Matt mentioned in passing that he was wanting more of the praline caramel cake from Radial Cafe.  I took that as a challenge and decided I would try to make my own version.  We could save a couple bucks and I could spend an afternoon baking.  Both two wonderful, wonderful things.

Below is a recipe for a caramel cake I got from smittenkitchen.com, a blog I have been following recently.  Here is the link: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2007/12/caramel-cake  As you will see, her cake was specifically a full fledged caramel cake.  I tweaked the icing, halved the recipe, and added the chopped pecans to ours.  I also turned them into cupcakes.  When making the icing, I ended up adding about 3/4 cup of powdered sugar to the caramel sauce.  I wanted to thicken the icing up a little bit.  

These cupcakes turned out so well!  The yellow cake is moist and not too sweet.  The caramel icing/glaze is also so good.  It is pretty sweet so it balances well with the yellow cake.  Matt has already asked me to make this recipe as an entire cake for his birthday. Matt said it gets a five out of five chicken wings in his book.  If you try them, I hope you enjoy!