Brown Butter and Apple Mini Cupcakes Recipe

When making these brown butter and apple mini cupcakes I was just having a bad day photography and otherwise. You know those kind of days where you drop everything and make silly little mistakes? Yeah, I had one of those days. The lighting wasn’t right no matter how long I waited for the perfect light, I accidentally deleted the short video I had taken while making the browned butter and when whipping the cream my hand slipped and I dropped the bowl, resulting in cream splatters everywhere. But, despite these issues I was determined to bring you a recipe because these mini cupcakes are bite sized pieces of heaven. So here we are…. bad lighting and everything.

This recipe uses a very traditional “creaming method” in making this cake. This means that the butter and sugar is beaten until a fluffy creamy like consistency is reached. The eggs are then added in, one by one and beaten again until smooth. The flour and any other ingredients are added in last and folded in until no lumps remain. It’s important to be careful not to over beat the mix after you have added in the flour. Over mixing will result in too much gluten forming in the mixture and gives the finished product a dense and chewy like consistency, not something you look for in a cake!

This recipe uses browned butter or as the french call it “beurre noisette”. This is a process that involves heating butter until the milk solids start to caramelise and burn causing a lovely hint of nuttiness to the butter. America’s Test Kitchen provide a beautifully descriptive video showing exactly how to achieve the ideal browned butter as shown below.

I topped these mini cupcakes with whipped cream, some leftover apple pie filling from my Apple Crumble Ice Cream recipe and some apple chips. Be warned about this recipe…. the tiny portioned cakes will fit into your mouth just a little too easily.