Chocolate Cupcakes

A year or two ago, I had a phase of making cupcakes.  I'd never made them before and they really won me over. I made burnt butter cupcakes, cappuccino cupcakes, lavender cupcakes, banana & white chocolate cupcakes, espresso cupcakes, chocolate and cherry cupcakes and lemon drizzle cupcakes, but I never made straightforward chocolate cupcakes.  A friend's birthday this week provided the opportunity and I made some very chocolatey cupcakes from a recipe in Divine.

Because these were birthday cakes and because I got such good results from exhaustively creaming the butter and sugar last week, I grabbed my spoon, shrugged my shoulders and used this method again.  Also because I was so impressed with the sour cream icing used last week, I used this one again rather than the one given in the recipe.

Here is what I did:

• Remembered to get the butter (200g unsalted) out early in the morning and put it over the heater to soften.
• Melted 200g dark chocolate (used 1 bar 70% and 1 bar 85%) in a bowl over hot water.
• Creamed the butter with 200g soft brown sugar for ages until it was really light.
• Then stirred in 4 eggs alternately with 200g flour (4oz wholemeal, 4oz white spelt) + 1 heaped tsp baking powder.
• Stirred in 1/2 pot of sour cream and then the melted chocolate.
• Tried to spoon mixture into 12 cup cake cases - big mistake!  The recipe stated that this made 12 cup cakes.  I had my suspicions about this and I was right - this is a recipe for 24 not 12, so the paper cases ended up being overfilled which then made it difficult to ice them and I still had some mixture left over.
  
• Baked these for 17 mins at 180°C.

• Melted another bar of 70% chocolate and stirred in the rest of the sour cream.
• Spread this as best I could over the cooled cup cakes.
• Decorated each with a sugar flour.

These looked pretty and tasted good, but I don't think the creaming paid off this time and next time I make them I shall try my normal melting butter, sugar and chocolate method.