Saturday, 14 May 2011

Feathered soured cream chocolate cupcakes


No real reason for making these. I had soured cream that needed to be used up, chocolate is a popular default option and I fancied having a try at feathering a decoration, after seeing Katie's beautiful decoration here. These seemed like reasons enough to bake.

I amalgamated a few recipes in books that I looked through to come up with something that suited my ingredients. So these are mine!


This is how I made them....

Feathered soured cream chocolate cupcakes
Ingredients
140g softened butter
100g caster sugar
75g light muscovado sugar
2 eggs
150ml soured cream (a small tub)
175g self raising flour
25g cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

120g chocolate for topping

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C.
- Cream the butter and sugars together until light in colour.
- Add the remaining ingredients - flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, eggs, soured cream, vanilla - and beat together until well combined. I'm such a lazy baker!
- Divide the mixture between 12 paper cases in a muffin tin.
- Bake for around 25 minutes until a cake tester/cocktail stick comes out clean and/or the cupcakes feel springy to touch.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack.


I decided to top these with Cadbury's milk chocolate, which is pretty thick when it's melted so it's fairly easy to work with. For the feathering I used Dr Oetker chocolate flavour writing icing and tried both white and dark chocolate flavours. For some weird reason, the white was so much easier to work with than the dark - the dark just didn't want to come out of the tube.

I'm pleased with the way the feathering worked in principle, and will do it again, but I think actually, using the icing was a mistake, and I would have been better using pure melted chocolate. The icing was a little too thick and sturdy to drag properly, whereas I think melted chocolate would have worked better. Ah well, lesson learned for next time.

The cakes themselves were delicious - chocolately and soft and the uniced surface of the cake went a little sticky and soft after a couple of days, really yummy! I'd use this recipe to make cupcakes again - they ended up being a good size too. All round success!

10 comments:

Katie said...

Your cake look yummy and I love the sound of them going soft and a little gooey.
Your feather effect looks great!

Suelle said...

A very pretty effect, and the cakes sound delicious too!

Alicia Foodycat said...

I always think feathering is such a lovely decoration on a cake! I've never got it right though. I don't think I work fast enough. Your cakes themselves sound gorgeous, too.

Anonymous said...

If you dip the icing tubes into a glass of warm water it will warm it up a bit and make it much easier to use.

I think it looks fab though!! :)

Caroline said...

Katie - thank you for the feathering inspiration in the first place!

Suelle - thanks.

Foodycat - I definitely need to practice the feathering. Ah well, must make more cake then...

Maggie - great tip, thank you very much for sharing that, and for dropping by to comment!

Anonymous said...

Oooh they look so pretty!!

Chele said...

Love the decoration, you make it seem easy but I am sure it isn't. They are too pretty to eat ;0)

Maggie said...

These cupcakes look fabulous.

Joanna @ Zeb Bakes said...

Those are so pretty, I love it when you do cake decorating, you make it all seem possible even to me, one of the worst cake icers around ;)

MissCakeBaker said...

The decoration is great. They look delicious!

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