Daring Bakers - Caramel cake with caramel buttercream

I have to say that I wasn't really thrilled when I saw this month's Daring Bakers recipe even though I love caramel. It seemed a bit too much to have a caramel cake and caramel frosting. But I decided to keep true to the recipe and see if maybe the combination worked. The only thing I did differently was cover the cake with caramelized chopped hazelnuts (store bought).
All components of the cake were easy to make. The only thing that went wrong was that my caramel sauce crystalized when it cooled. But it was just a matter of reheating to solve that.
The cake is sweeter than your average cake and I didn't really tasted caramel. This type of buttercream, mixing icing sugar with butter is not really my favourite buttercream. It's just not as smooth as your meringue based buttercream. I did like the fact that it used browned butter instead of regular. This in combination with the caramel sauce made it tasting good. Of course it was sweet but that's because it's buttercream ;)
Up till 5 minutes before baking the cake I didn't know if I was making a bigger (but still small) cake or some cupcakes (I made half a batch of everything). I only had mini panettone paper cups and decided to use those. They are quite a bit bigger than regular muffin cups so I ended up filling only 3. I filled them pretty full because I've been reading on the DB forum that the cake didn't rise too much. Also I didn't have enough for 4 cups. End result: they rose quite a bit and were too high to apply icing in a pretty way. So I went for plan B and took the cakelets out of the paper cup and cut off their tops and ended up with mini cakes. Filled them with one layer of buttercream and covered the outside with buttercream. I thought the buttercream was not very cooperative and it took me some time to get a smooth enough layer. Covered the cakes with caramelized chopped hazelnuts which turned out to be tricky because they didn't stick to the buttercream by themselves. Had to stick them to the buttercream one piece at a time...just kidding ;)
Decoration is hazelnuts dipped in caramel.
After tasting the end result I wasn't convinced. Not that it tasted bad, not at all but like A said, something is missing. I think the thing that was missing was another taste to complement the caramel. Obvious choices are dark chocolate and coffee.

Recipe by Shuna Fish Lydon

Hosted by Alex of Blondie and Brownie
Jenny of Foray into Food
Dolores of Chronicles of Culinary Curiosity

You will find the recipe on the sites of the hosts.
Check out this link for all the other Daring Bakers