Chocolate cupcakes with coffee-caramel ermine frosting

These are the go-to chocolate cupcakes that I've blogged about previously. I also thought I'd try making an ermine frosting, using Cupcake Jemma's Ermine Buttercream as my jumping-off point. Of note, the flour/sugar mixture that gets toasted in the beginning was probably starting to caramellize a bit when I added the coconut milk to it, so I accidentally ended up with a delightful caramel frosting that I also added about 1/2 tsp of of instant coffee granules to, to get a coffee-caramel result (I was inspired by our local vegan doughnut shop's chocolate coffee toffee flavoured doughnut).

The frosting turned out incredibly delicious, but — as is often the case when I'm using soy-free margarine in place of butter — the result was less firm than I was hoping for. I think I might mess around with the flour ratios in the future to try to stabilize it further. Also, the recipe makes at least three times more frosting than was necessary for a batch of a dozen cupcakes, so I could easily halve the amounts to get a good amount of frosting for a dozen cupcakes in the future. In the plus column, I now have a lot of frosting ready-to-go, in the freezer.

My version as follows:

75g All-Purpose Flour
400g Granulated Sugar
460g Coconut Milk
460g Soy-Free Vegan Margarine

Sea Salt to taste
Instant Coffee Granules to taste
1 tsp Vanilla Extract to taste