Chocolate fudge cupcakes

Yummy chocolate cupcakes as far as the eye can see. This is another simple recipe, but they do look quite attractive when they're all iced and ready to go. It's a basic victoria sponge type cake mix but with a couple of modifications. One is obviously the addition of cocoa powder to make them into chocolate cupcakes, and the other is that instead of using caster sugar I used a combination of dark and light muscovado sugar to give them a nice depth of flavour. So without further ado, here's the recipe.

Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate glace icing
Ingredients
4oz/120g very soft butter
2oz/60g dark muscovado sugar
2oz/60g light muscovado sugar
3.5oz/100g self raising flour
0.5oz/20g cocoa powder
2 large eggs

For the icing
3oz/75g dark chocolate (I used 72% Green and Blacks - yum!)
3/4oz/22g butter
3tbsp warm water (from the kettle)
6oz/175g icing sugar

Method

-Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Line a muffin tin with muffin cases.

-Cream the two sugars with the butter until light and fluffy. The mixture will not become as light in colour as normal due to the dark sugars, but will lighten noticeably as you mix it.

-Add the eggs, one at a time beating after each addition, with a spoonful of flour to stop the mixture curdling if you want.

-Fold in the rest of the flour and spoon into the muffin cases.

-Place in the oven and bake for around 25 minutes, but start to check after 20.

-Remove when ready (cake tester/cocktail stick comes out clean and they feel firm and springy to the touch) to a wire rack to cool.

-Make the icing by melting the chocolate, butter and warm water together in a bowl placed over a pan of hot water, stirring once or twice to mix well.

-Add the icing sugar, and beat well to get all the lumps out. You could sift the icing sugar (and I would recommend this if your icing sugar is lumpy at all to start with) but I'm lazy and my icing sugar seemed fairly non-lumpy to start with. I do find that sometimes I sift the icing sugar and it clumps up anyway, and I hate sifting icing sugar, it's such a faff that I often don't bother.

-Ice the cooled cupcakes. Decorate any way you fancy, I kept it simple with some bought sugar flowers, but you could let your imagination run wild with piped designs etc etc. It's entirely up to you!

Butter and the two different sugars before mixing.
And after creaming the butter and sugar together. The mixture has lightened.

Naked cupcakes waiting for their load of icing. They do seem a little on the mean side, but because this icing is a poured rather than piped one, you want a little space in the cases to allow the icing to pool into a nice deep layer, as shown below:

Mmmm, yummy icing and delicate chocolate cake. These were really scrummy and disappeared quickly with lots of appreciative comments. I did manage to snaffle one for myself though before they all went! The icing was good, being both quicker and easier to make than buttercream, and less sweet and rich (which is good in my book as I find buttercream too sickly) but was very slightly grainy. The icing really did run down the side of the cupcakes as you can see on the right hand side in the above photo.

A lovely glossy icing for a sweet and simple cupcake.