decisions are best made before midnight

First off:

After thirty five days, hours spent with our fabulous insurance agent Angeline and even more hours spent with their hack-job "insurance company", several delays on the body work, and countless "not yet" responses to the Anderson family question of the summer "Is the car fixed yet?"...

MY CAR IS BACK.

We got the call last night, I decided this warranted some sort of little celebration. A celebration in the form of chocolate ganache cupcakes with sea salt caramel and chocolate frosting. 

These things take absolutely forever to make. Its one of those deals where you break out the baking sheet at around eight o' clock, figuring it'll be an hour, tops. Then you start reading the recipe (http://foodgawker.com/favorites/lca925/ , first recipe after the jump) which includes instructions like "pour in two shots of espresso" (this means, of course, you must make espresso), "make caramel" or "let frosting chill for two hours". And so at eleven, when everything's baked and made, it seems silly to have spent all that time and have the frosting look bad.

That's when the pastry bag comes out. Best thing my mom has ever bought me.

Fair warning, these things are addictive. And terrible. They are essentially a hodge-podge of things that are bad for you (coffee, butter, sugar) and things that are worse (heavy cream, caramel, vast quantities of chocolate) consolidated into one tiny cupcake. But since its all from scratch, its not processed (good!). So it all sort of evens out.
And they are by far the best cupcakes I've ever made/had. Even beating out NYC spring break three-quarter pound Oreo cupcakes.

Listening to: Rumour Has It, ADELE