Surprise Cupcakes

Let’s get back to some baking shall we?

Recently one of my friends invited me to celebrate his birthday at a pub. The invitation was pretty short notice but I decided the best gift I could give him (apart from the macaroni cheese in my man vs food post – which, incidentally, he’s been nagging me for ever since he read it) would be some cakes. *Cheap*

A week before the invitation, I’d bought some mini Lindt Lindor chocolates – God, I love them – and so I thought I’d try and make a cupcake with a lindor chocolate in the centre.

A mixture of milk chocolate and white chocolate balls of fabulousness

Chocolate cakes would be too rich, so a vanilla batter would be the best option. No icing on them either as I needed to put them in a cake tin and I also believed that the sweet in the centre would be sweet enough.

I popped the chocolates into the freezer for an hour – to prevent them from melting the second they hit the hot oven – and then realised that I didn’t have enough chocolates for each cupcake. Never fear! There’s always a stray box of chocolates in the Partyspanner household (it’s my secret shame) so I dug out a half empty box of mint chocolates and broke them in half before shoving the lot in the freezer.

Mint crisps mainly. *drool*

I whipped up a vanilla batter

Smoooooth

And double lined my muffin trays with jaunty cases before adding the batter to each case, adding a chocolate and then “topping up” the cases until they were 3/4 full.

It's like the russian roulette of cupcakes

Into the oven for..er, I think it was about 20 minutes and they came out looking (and smelling) pretty good.

I just HAD to try one to see how they turned out

Mint crisp! Dammit!

SHIT! The chocolate had sunk to the bottom of the cake. The sponge was tasty though (and the mint had infused through the cake while baking which was interesting). I decided to take the risk and after letting the cakes cool completely, I placed them into a tin and took them to the pub.

There were more on the bottom layer, honestly!

At the pub we all had a few drinks, toasted the birthday boy, and I opened the tin. People started eating the cakes and I suddenly heard my name being bandied about with the phrase “hash cakes”. At first I thought they must be saying “smashing cakes” until someone actually asked me what was on the bottom of the cakes. Confused, I looked at the empty case in the someone’s hands and saw:

Oh. Em. Gee. I'm a drugdealer.

Gah! All of the chocolates had sunk – DAMN THEIR EYES – and so I had basically served up plain vanilla sponges with encrusted chocolate cupcake cases. Genius.

Ah well, the cakes soaked up a little bit of the alcohol at any rate.

Cases on drinks tray

Typical Partyspanner.

Halloween Cakes

Continuing on from my last post

Many, Many cakes…

All lifting out of their cases

Why do my cupcakes lift away from their cases? I’ve done a little research and it appears that the moister the cake batter, the more likely it will be that the cases will lift away from the finished article. The choice is either delicious moist cakes or dryer more beautiful ones…

As these cakes are going to be eaten today I decided to do away with the papers.

I whipped up a batch of chocolate buttercream icing

Impressive spooky icing fog

and applied a layer of frosting to each cake…

YUM!

and then got on with creating the owl cupcakes. I halved 2 oreos and pressed a brown m&m into each half to create the eyes. I then placed an orange m&m for a beak.

Ta-DA! Oh! Isn't it CUTE?

The oreo baked into the bottom of the cakes worked really well too

Hoorah!

The fairy cakes are obviously too small for such decoration, so I improvised and used some of the broken oreo cookies as gravestones, and added some pre-made sugarpaste decorations.

Pumpkin on grave...woooOOOooooo

And so I’m done with the cakes.

So, so sweet

Various decorations

And now to get on with EVERYTHING ELSE.

Wish me luck!