Caramel cake is hyper-regional, an icon of the American South thought to have originated within the Mississippi Delta area. For the uninitiated, image a cloud-soft yellow cake encased in a golden frosting with the style and texture of fudge, the sort you would possibly purchase on vacation in a seaside city. It’s the frosting that provides caramel cake its character—and its status for being difficult to make. The very best caramel frostings are cooked; buttercreams made with caramel sauce merely don’t make the minimize. Historically made by cooking down milk and sugar till they caramelize, fashionable frosting variations (just like the one used on this caramel cake recipe) reap the benefits of the convenience and dark-molasses depth of brown sugar. Whereas uncommon, browning a portion of the butter intensifies the caramel taste of the frosting, introducing a welcome ingredient of smokiness. Including room-temperature butter towards the top of the blending course of, a method from America’s Take a look at Kitchen, retains the frosting gentle and spreadable for a valuable few additional minutes, simply lengthy sufficient to unfold over the buttery, vanilla-scented cake. The frosting is undeniably candy. The addition of vinegar and a beneficiant quantity of salt are supposed to mitigate, however not masks, the hallmark sweetness. With out that faint fudge-like grit, Southern caramel cake wouldn’t be the identical. Utilizing bleached cake flour as an alternative of all-purpose flour ensures cake layers with the tenderest crumb.
