Devil's Food Cupcakes for National Cupcake Week

As I'm sure most of you know, this week in the UK is National Cupcake Week, so I couldn't let it pass without trying a recipe I've been wanting to taste for ages, and it did not disappoint. I can't believe I waited so long to make these cupcakes, because they are, in a word, amazing. Not that I mean to blow my own trumpet, but wow, I loved this recipe so much I made them two nights in a row! But don't worry, I didn't eat them all myself...

Anyway, I'll share the recipe, which is from the Next I <3 Cupcakes book, which someone bought for me as a gift. It's actually quite a nice little book. It says it makes 18 cupcakes, but if you ask me they'd have to be quite stingy cupcakes because I only made 14 in quite small cupcake cases.

Ready for the oven!

You may (or may not) know from reading my previous posts, I'm always a bit skeptical of 'all in the bowl and beat' recipes, probably because my mum taught me to bake a lot as a child in the old wooden spoon and fold in the flour method. But I was pleasantly surprised, because these cakes did actually rise very well, in spite of my cranky old oven. I suppose you do fold in the sour cream, so maybe that traps the air in!

But alas, another failed cupcake case, as these went horribly see-through.

Anyway, here's the recipe, let me know if anyone gives it a try!

For the cakes:

50g butter

115g soft dark brown sugar

2 large eggs

115g plain flour

1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda

25g cocoa powder

125ml soured cream

• Preheat oven to 180⁰C and line a muffin tin with cases
• Sift flour, and beat sugar, margarine, eggs, flour, cocoa powder and bicarb of soda until just smooth
• Fold in sour cream with a large metal spoon.
• Bake for 15-20 mins until well risen and firm

For the icing:

125g plain chocolate

3 tbsp caster sugar (use more or less depending on how sweet you want the icing)

150ml soured cream

• Melt chocolate, and leave to cool slightly once fully melted, then whisk in sugar and soured cream until combined. Ice each cupcakes and decorate as desired!

The see-through case :(

But oh, the yummy, yummy chocolate!

Some juicy cupcakes

Last week I decided to go for an old favourite recipe of chocolate orange cupcakes from a generic cupcake recipe book. The book says this mixture makes 16 cupcakes...they must be really stingy because I just about scrape 10! I wish I had doubled up but I didn't, and 10 cupcakes were never going to make my chums at work happy on a Friday afternoon, so I also made plain orange cupcakes.

I had never made orange cupcakes before, and I just took a recipe for orange cake but split it into cupcakes. OH.MY. I am a complete chocolate obsessive but I loved these plain orange cupcakes. They rose to perfection (for a change!) and were soft, light and fluffy.


Recipe for chocolate orange cake:

115g butter

115g golden caster sugar

inely grated rind and juice from 1/2 orange

2 eggs

115 self-raising flour

25g plain chocolate, grated

• Preheat oven to 180⁰.
• Put butter, sugar and orange rind in a bowl and beat together until light and fluffy.
• Gradually beat in eggs.
• Sift in the flour and, using a metal spoon, fold gently into the mixture with orange juice and grated chocolate.
• Bake cupcakes for around 20 minutes, until risen and golden brown.

Very sweet and simple!

The recipe for the orange cake came from Australian Women's Weekly Cupcakes & Baking book. I basically used the mixing method above, but with the following ingredients (technically a cake recipe, but made about 16 deliciously huge cakes!):

150g butter

1 tbsp finely grated orange rind

(I added a splash of fresh orange juice too)

150g caster sugar

3 eggs

225g self-raising flour

60ml milk

I couldn't tell you the recipe for my frosting, because usual I chucked everything in haphazardly until it looked right. Anyway, to decorate the chocolate orange, I piped a simple chocolate buttercream and put a Malteaser in the middle. For the orange cupcakes, I used the rest of the fresh squeezed orange juice to make an orange buttercream, and decorated with fondant roses, using this fantastically easy tutorial from Almond Art. I then piped leaves using a Wilton #67 tip...as you can see from the pictures, I have yet to perfect the technique of piping leaves, and cake photography! Still, I was pretty chuffed with these cakes, and they were delicious.

Chocolate Mud Cake

So Sunday in fact ended up being beautifully sunny after the rainfall in the night, so my beau and I headed out for the day to catch the rays. I made sure to stop by the shop for ingredients though, as I've been meaning to try this recipe from Sarah-Jane's blog since she posted it in March. Unfortunately for me, she posted it during lent, and every year (don't ask me why or how it started!), I give up chocolate. It's not for religious reasons, it's just to prove to myself that I don't need to eat chocolate - yes it does always end with me stuffing my face on Easter Sunday, so yes it probably is pointless, but it's sort of a tradition. Anyway giving up chocolate means all things chocolate; cake, biscuits, milkshake, hot chocolate etc etc. Basically anything that has chocolate/cocoa powder in it, therefore everything I love!

Anyway, I gave this chocolate mud cake a try, and as Sarah-Jane says, this does make a mammoth amount of mixture and needed my biggest mixing bowl. I took her advice and ladled this into a jug before attempting to pour it into moulds. I made four extra wide cupcakes, using Zeal silicone moulds, six heart shaped cupcakes, and a CAKE cake mould, which Sarah-Jane sells in her online shop. And that wasn't even all of the mixture used up!

I greased and floured my moulds, but I think I will just grease in future, as I found the flour stuck to the side of the cakes and didn't look very nice. I didn't have any trouble getting the cooked cake out of the heart shaped moulds or the large cupcake moulds, but sadly for me being as impatient as I am and trying to pop it out straight away, my CAKE cake didn't make it. This cake is fragile, especially when hot, and unfortuantely the C and the K broke. I would have recreated the broken letters to make a complete CAKE, but my sticky-fingered friends snatched the intact A and E, and ate them, so I gave up on that idea.

With the extra wide cupcakes, I tried out a decorating idea from a book by Lily Vanilli entitled 'A Zombie Ate My Cupcake' for the first time. This book features many deliciously gory recipes, and I would like to review the book in a later post, but I am aware this one is dragging on. Anyway, thus, my Zombie Hands were born! These cakes are a little gruesome, so not for the faint hearted!

They didn't come out perfect, and I apologise for my bad photography skills here, but you get the idea - zombie hands breaking free from the soil in a graveyard.

For the hearts I went a bit more cutesy, filling my cake moulds with about 1cm of chocolate to make solid chocolate toppers, as Sarah-Jane did in her post. Mine did not look nearly as perfect as hers did, and I should have placed the mould onto a baking sheet prior to putting it in the fridge, as it bent slightly picking it up, causing the molton chocolate to run up the sides and leaving me with wonky toppers. But we live and learn, and I am just learning as I go along!

This cake was as I expected - deliciously sweet, gooey, and completely sinful, and I loved it. They weren't my most picture perfect cakes, but nobody seemed to mind!