So, I was afraid this might happen.

I’m back on a cupcake kick again. Last month when I made these, I warned you about my baking in cycles. Well, this month another friend had another birthday at another bar, and another fresh batch of homemade cupcakes crashed the party.

I might be getting back on the cupcake train, but as you may have heard, a lot of Americans have had enough and want to get off. In case you’ve been living under a rock, the news broke recently that Crumbs cupcakes has shuttered their doors after being kicked off of the Nasdaq stock market. I’m not going to claim that I also predicted this, but I did say that the cupcake trend was over. And I was right. The Crumbs legacy has come to an end, but that’s not to say that the cupcake’s legacy has. While the trend is over, the cupcake itself is not.

So the cupcake is no longer the celebrity of the dessert world. So what? That’s okay. Actually, I’m pretty happy about it. That means that now we can get back to enjoying the cupcake for what it is instead of what it represents. We can get back to just eating cupcakes because they’re good, and fun, and portable, and perfectly portioned; and stop eating them because they’re hip, and trendy, and expensive, and pretty, and because you saw Carrie Bradshaw eating one that one time.

While I’m on the subject of eating cupcakes for all the wrong reasons, let’s go back to Crumbs for just a moment. Brace yourself though. I’m about to say something scandalous and potentially polarizing.

Crumbs sucked.

They were just terrible. Like, the worst. I know some people liked them, and I know the media is mourning their loss as they would the loss of a beloved celebrity, but this was one of those tacky celebrities that were famous for being famous, not for having any real talent or substance. People ate Crumbs because they heard that they were great. They saw their friends on Facebook taking a selfie with a cupcake the size of their head. They saw that the chain was everywhere and thought they had to be doing something right, but the only thing Crumbs was doing right was marketing. The cupcakes themselves didn’t live up to the legend, and eventually, finally, that caught up to them.

Crumbs cupcakes were stale and dry and tasteless, that is, unless you consider SWEET a flavor. They were piled high with mountains of thick, pasty, tooth-rottingly sweet frosting, and they were gigantic for no good reason. Those cupcakes could have fed a family of four.

The only thing better than a bad cupcake is a HUGE bad cupcake, right? right? Ugh.

If you were one of the Crumbs lovers in the world, I’m truly sorry, but this is a good thing! There are plenty of other bakeries out there making way better cupcakes than Crumbs ever did, so please don’t mourn too hard. The way I see it, the fall of the famous-for-being-famous cupcakes empire is a step forward.  Now we can start our journey away from eating cupcakes because they’re trendy, pretty sugar-bombs, and get back to loving cupcakes for being tasty little single-serving cakes. Delicious, wonderful, festive, easily transported tasty little single-serving cakes.

If you’re like me, rather than hunting for a great bakery, you’d probably prefer to make your own cupcakes. Instead of mourning, why not celebrate by firing up the oven and making something tasty at home?

The birthday girl who inspired these cupcakes is crazy about salt. She’s the kind of gal who eats (salted) tortilla chips with a salt shaker in hand. So, for her birthday I thought salted caramel was the obvious way to go. What better way to make our salt-fiend friend happy on her birthday?

Boy did these cupcakes ever deliver. Not only was she was thrilled, but so was everyone else, including the bartender. They combine super chocolatey cake, creamy homemade salted caramel sauce, and a tangy velvety cream cheese icing. Then the cherry on top of it all is a chocolate covered salty pretzel!

The cake itself is delightfully chocolatey and just sweet enough; with a soft, moist crumb and a tender, almost springy texture. To pack as much punch into the cake as possible, I injected them with a little bit of caramel sauce using a marinade injector. It sort of melts into and moistens the cake, rather than creating a pocket of caramel. If you don’t want to do this, or don’t have a way to make it happen, it’s totally fine. The cake is really wonderful on it’s own, I just have a tendency to take things further than necessary.

The salted caramel sauce here is super easy to make and completely delicious. It’s creamy and sweet and buttery and rich and pleasantly salty. You’ll want to make it first so it has time to cool down while the rest of the components come together.

As if there wasn’t enough flavor in these cupcakes, I decided to go with a tangy cream cheese icing with plenty of sweet and salty caramel sauce whipped in. The end result is creamy and soft and full of rich caramely punch, backed up by that distinctive cream cheese twang. The one problem with cream cheese icing is that it tends to be so soft that it’s hard to pipe because it wants to kind of sink into itself. You can add more sugar to stiffen it, but then it ends up being too sweet, at least that is, for my taste. If you want to pipe this icing though, I’d recommend refrigerating it for at least an hour beforehand. Otherwise just slather it on with an offset spatula.

Just to drive the sweet and salty point home, I topped each finished cupcake with a salty chocolate covered pretzel, drizzled even more homemade caramel sauce over the top, and finished with a tiny sprinkling of flaky crunchy fleur de sel.