I knew the time would come when I would be forced to make cupcakes without my belove-ed Anna and I had saved up a stupidly silly and sickly idea that I'd never dare suggest to a cupcake genius like herself. Super chocolate cupcakes with pink strawberry buttercream. They turned out pretty good. I fell in love with the sickly pink icing as soon as I'd made it and Jess plastered the cakes in it as I scoffed chocolate chips, a few of which managed to make it to the cakes.
I think I've got my cupcake recipe pretty much sorted after a few months of tweaking. It's all pretty easy to remember - I call it the 6,5,4,3,2 recipe. So here goes:
Ingredients:
6 oz self raising flour
5 oz caster sugar
4 oz butter or marg. or something butter-esk
3 table spoons of cocoa mixed with boiling water to make a paste (this helps the flavour come out more apparently?)
2 eggs
Basically mix everything together. I tend to do butter plus sugar, then flour, eggs and cocoa but that's just me. You want to get as much air as possible into the mixture, either with a magic whizzer or just with a spoon.
Then the buttercream is just the normal recipe. Butter/marg and icing sugar mixed to taste - make sure it's lots more sugar than butter. (Don't make the mistake of asking other people to taste - you end up with none left!) Then I added a teeeny bit of cochineal or pink food colouring. This tends to be quite strong so make sure it's only a little bit of you want baby pink rather than dark red. I also added 3 or 4 drops of strawberry flavourings but I've read that strawberry jam works quite well.
Then they're topped of with a few chocolate chips. Think they looks pretty pretty. What do you think? I used the new cases from the magic sewing and baking shop in Fal and I think they look good but they seem to be peeling away from the cakes quite a lot. Not sure why. Does make them look ready to eat right now though...
