Birthday Cakes and Blackberries

The best part of the indulgent ice cream and cupcake combo is (and forever will be) after the ice cream has dwindled to puddles of sweet cream and the cupcake has all but been devoured...leaving a plate full of cupcake soup to lick clean. An ode’ to that old time fave, a scoop of this ice cream is salty and sweet, packed full of soggy, crumbly, mushed up cupcake bottoms and hand fulls of indulgently frosted cupcake tops. During the peak of the cupcake’s heyday, we actually dreamed about a rotating monthly cupcake flavor, and debuted our first in April 2012. Like perms and other ill-fated ideas, it lasted a mere three months; however, this first flavor was so popular that it managed to secure its place in Salt & Straw’s vault. Our good friends at the beloved Cupcake Royale, Seattle’s first cupcake bakery (and the first outside of New York City), used to send us day-olds to test with, and generously provided the recipe for one of our favorites, the Salted Caramel Cupcake. Just as we did then, our kitchen includes both cubes of salted-caramel-buttercream-frosted chocolate cake and crumbled cake that soaks up the fleur de sel-spiked base, reminiscent of the tempered ice cream cakes from the birthday parties of yore.