Super Chocolatey Chocolate Cupcakes

Baking for bake sales is equally fun and exhausting. You get the satisfaction of making lots and lots of cakes that look really pretty, but by the end of the day you've got icing in your hair and and aching feet. This week I'm baking for two sales, both to raise money for the magazine I edit. When baking for a bake sale I find it's best to go for crowd pleaser's. It's not the time to give those avocado brownies you've been eyeing up a while a go, it's the time to whack out your best chocolate cake and make it look as tasty as possible. 

My best chocolate cake is just amazing. It's huge, it has outrageous amounts of icing and every slice looks like a doorstop. It's from a fantastic recipe book called "Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer" that I've had for years. To make the bake sale slightly easier, I divided the mixture into cupcake cases instead - much quicker for people to grab when they pop out of the office for a coffee, and no need for napkins or forks. I mixed the icing up a bit, topping some of the cakes with the recommended chocolate buttercream, and made some of them into butterfly cakes with caramel buttercream.

I know the pictures have you drooling, I know all you want now is the recipe. It would be rude of me to deny you of the treat, so here we go!

Chocolate Cupcakes

175g Dark Soft Brown Sugar

175g Light Soft Brown Sugar

350g Unsalted Butter

6 Eggs

270g Self-raising Flour

80g Cocoa Powder

2tsp Baking Powder

Rich Chocolate Buttercream

175g Icing Sugar

55g Cocoa Powder 

75g Butter

A splash of milk

Caramel Buttercream

175g Icing Sugar

50g Butter

2tsp Caramel Flavouring

A splash of milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C

2. Cream the sugars with the butter, then add each egg individually

3. Add the dry ingredients to the mixture then spoon into cupcake cases. This recipe makes around 30 cupcakes when you put around 50g of mix into each case. I don't normally bother to weigh out the mix in each cupcake case, but when your baking for a sale there's something nice about complete consistency.

4. Bake for around 20 minutes, or until a skewer comes out of the cake clean.

 
5. For the cupcakes with chocolate buttercream simply make up the chocolate buttercream and pipe it on top of the cupcake however you fancy. For the caramel topped cupcakes, chop the top of the cupcake off.

6. Pipe a splodge of icing on the flat part of the cupcake, then cut the top of the cupcake in half and stick them in either side of the icing splodge, like butterfly wings!

If you're making these for a bake sale, try and resist eating them before the day! If you're just treating yourself, tuck into the cupcakes with a cup of tea.