Caramel Cupcakes with Butterscotch Filling

It's officially the holiday season, and the weather is getting cooler, which means it's time for baking! I didn't make much over the summer because of the heat and also being super busy, but now with several Halloween parties I've had a good excuse to make something new.

These cupcakes were not the best that I've made, but that's the risk you run when you try new recipes all the time! They were not terrible, but they were very dense and difficult to fill. Carry on for more pictures and my critiques.

I wanted to make a cake that would complement butterscotch pudding (the filling) so I searched for caramel cakes and came up with this recipe. I think the cake recipe would make a very good bundt or loaf cake, because of the dense texture and low sweetness level, but it just somehow didn't work very well to cupcakes. As you can see, the batter is quite thick, and the cake didn't rise drastically:

The flavor was pretty light, and not very caramel-y. I think it reminded more of shortbread. It would probably be very tasty layered in a trifle or something with  more moisture.

I filled them with butterscotch pudding, but the cake was so dense that not much pudding stayed inside. I've had much better luck filling very light cupcakes (like ones made with cake mix, which are notoriously fluffy), but it's always hard to tell how light or dense a cake will be when you haven't tried the recipe before.

I frosted them with lightly sweetened whipped cream and decorated them with leaf-shaped sprinkles. These were for a friend's birthday party slash Halloween party, so I went with more of a general fall theme with the liners and decorations. People liked them, but they weren't super popular, and I can definitely understand why. My coworkers finished off the rest.

I would probably not make this particular recipe again, but I definitely want to try again with filled cupcakes! I'll just have to keep searching for a suitable cake to fill...