Mint chocolate cupcakes (with extras)

"Mum Goodwin's Chocolate Cake" (from Julie Goodwin's book Our Family Table) makes a nice adaptable chocolate cake base. And I find it kind of fascinating that it tastes so good when it doesn't actually contain any chocolate!

You don't add the cocoa and water mixture into the batter until the final mixing stage, so you get to see it go from what looks like a vanilla cake to suddenly very definitely chocolate!

A word of caution - if you make the full recipe as written into cupcakes you get around 40 little cakes out of it! So since this first run I've taken to halving it and getting the more respectable number of around 20, which you could stretch to an even 2 dozen if you made them a little on the light side.

It was a Friday night and I was feeling experimental so I put strawberry jam in the centre of some of the cupcakes.


In others I put little mint chocolate logs. I didn't realise until after baking that these were, sadly, a bit on the chewy side, but it still added an extra bit of pepperminty flavour.


I pressed Oreo cookies into the top of some of the cupcakes, because you can't really go wrong with the chocolate cake and Oreo pairing.

I tried out a "marshmallow icing" trick that I'd read of on a blog ages ago. When the cupcakes were nearly baked, I took them out and placed a marshmallow on top of each one, then finished baking them. Finally I put them under the grill for a few minutes to brown them a little... but these turned out to be a bit of a mess! Not at all how I imagined they would go, but maybe I baked the marshmallows too long, and they tasted fine anyway.

I had been meaning to make peppermint icing for a very long time, and finally I did it. Yum! Just add peppermint essence to your buttercream instead of vanilla or rosewater.


I enjoyed adding random extras to my cakes, but these basic swirls of peppermint on chocolate definitely looked the classiest.

I added just a dob of icing to the ones with jam or Nutella baked in (did I mention Nutella? I didn't end up eating one of them, but Nutella can't really fail as far as I'm concerned).

This chocolate cake recipe is going on my list of staple bases, and now I have 3 standard buttercream flavours (vanilla, rosewater and peppermint) to mix and match with :)

Cupcake? More like mugcake!

My new mug. I found it at the supermarket for under $5. How could I say no?

Pirate cupcake misadventure

I had some rosewater buttercream leftover from my turkish delight cupcakes and thought I should use it up somehow. Tip for the future: rosewater buttercream doesn't really go with chocolate cupcakes! But I had fun with the decorating.

Here are my cupcakes, all ready to go. I used Willow Bird Baking's "Wacky Cake" recipe base, which is egg and dairy-free. (It came out a bit dry, but maybe I over-baked it... nothing a bit of Nutella filling wouldn't fix next time!)

My Domestic Cowboy has previously bought black food colouring gel from a specialty store to make cookie icing, but we recently discovered that you can get this liquid stuff at the supermarket much cheaper! As you can see, it doesn't really make the icing black, but it had kind of an interesting silvery metallic sheen to it.

I first did a layer of blue, à la pirate-infested water. And then it was time to test out the new 3S icing tip.

Turns out 3S is great for writing and drawing! (...if you can draw :p)

Although the flavour combination was less than grand, I was quite happy with these, and with the potential for making "Eat Me" Alice In Wonderland cakes in the future with my new friend, 3S.

Arr, me hearties!

Turkish Delight Cupcakes

Full-time work isn't doing much for my rate of blogging, but fear not - the baking continues.

Earlier in the year my friend Nicole and I were discussing how awesome turkish delight cupcakes would surely be, so I decided to make some. I couldn't find a specific recipe, but figured I couldn't go too wrong.

I used my regular vanilla cupcake recipe, but substituted rosewater for the vanilla essence, and added 4-5 chunks of chopped up turkish delight (just the regular kind from the supermarket, with chocolate coating) to each cupcake before baking them.

I really like the look of the chunks baked into the cake. Texture-y.

I made some larger muffin-sized cakes too, utilising my turkish-delight-appropriate pink patty pans.

As good as the cakes looked in their natural state, I still wanted to cover them with sweet rosewater buttercream to make sure the turkish delight flavour won the day. Start by adding just a little rosewater to the buttercream, and keep going until you decide it has reached its highest potential for awesomeness (this doesn't necessarily mean adding very much - but taste it before you slap it onto your cute little cakes!).

I only added a little bit of food colouring to the mix so the colours don't contrast very well (especially in photos), but I was happy with the soft-ish look to go with the very girly flavour.

The vanilla cake carries it off nicely, and the chewy chunks hidden away inside are my favourite part. Having put these together without a lot of thought, I happily conclude that you can't really go wrong with turkish delight cupcakes!