Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate lime buttercream

It's that time again - We Should Cocoa! This month's challenge was set by Chele over at Chocolate Teapot - she announced that the challenge this month was to be lime! Lime isn't a flavour that I'm very familiar with, I am more often to be found zesting lemons and oranges, so this was a good challenge for me.

It seems at the moment that I'm obsessed with buttercream frosting - what can I say? Well, I guess after years of thinking that I really don't like buttercream all that much - too sweet and sickly, I've come to appreciate a swirl on top of a cupcake can be a good, in fact, great thing indeed. I still don't want too much, which is why you can still see cake around the edges - too much is still too much, if you see what I mean...

So, in line with my current obsession I decided to make chocolate cupcakes with chocolate lime buttercream frosting. If you look really carefully you can see tiny little flecks of green in the buttercream - it is there, I promise!

The cupcake recipe is Nigella Lawson's cupcake base from her Night-and-Day Cupcakes, which she has apparently shared with Good Morning America - so I'll point you there for the method, and for cup measures if that's your thing. If not, the measurements are given below:

Night-and-Day Cupcakes
Ingredients
2 scant tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp boiling water
75g golden caster sugar
50g dark muscovado sugar
125g self-raising flour
2 large eggs
125g very soft butter
1tsp vanilla extract
1tbsp milk, plus more if necessary to achieve a dropping consistency.

For the buttercream
75g very soft butter
150g icing sugar
zest and juice of 1 (very large, or 2 smaller) lime(s)



These were very popular and disappeared rapidly at work. The lime was subtle perhaps I need to add it to the cake batter as well next time, but these were delicious as all chocolate cupcakes are!