Dark Chocolate Tea Cupcakes with Sweet Tea Frosting and Marzipan Penguins

Dark Chocolate Tea Cupcakes with Sweet Tea Frosting and Marzipan Penguins

This weekend we celebrated the birthday of my great friend Liz. Liz likes tea, chocolate, and penguins, so these cupcakes were an exercise in combining the three in the best possible way.

Cupcakes:
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup whole milk
1/4 cup loose-leaf jasmine tea

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Combine tea and milk in a saucepan and bring to a simmer on the stove. Remove from heat, cover, and let steep for 30 minutes.

Sift together sugar, flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and baking soda. Beat together eggs and vegetable oil in another bowl.

Take the steeped milk tea and strain out the tea leaves. Save them.

Mix everything together until smooth. The batter is very liquid at this point.

Fill cupcake tins 3/4 of the way full. Bake 15 minutes, turn, and bake 15 minutes. Let cool.

Adapted from The Foodies' Kitchen.

Frosting:
The tea leaves you saved from before
1/4 cup boiling water
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, soft
1/2 cup shortening
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted.

Combine tea leaves and water and leave in the fridge to steep and cool, about 30 minutes. Strain out the tea leaves (this time you can get rid of them).

Meanwhile, beat the butter and shortening until smooth, and sift in the powdered sugar. Add the tea, then beat until smooth.

The icing will be a gorgeous pale brown color. If desired, you can tint it.

Adapted from Confesions of a Cookbook Queen



Penguins:
12 oz marzipan

Divide into three portions, one large, one medium, one small. Use food paste to tint the small portion orange and the large portion black. Make little penguins. Use magic if necessary.

Candy Bar Cupcakes

Candy Bar Cupcakes

Cupcakes:

1 2/3 cups flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 cup brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup butterscotch chips
1/4 cup toffee pieces
1/2 cup cashews, smashed into bits (or your favorite nut)
1/3 cup mini chocolate chips

Heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Sift together flour and baking powder. Cream butter and sugar together. Add in the eggs and vanilla and beat until well combined. At this point, the batter is really, really thick. Add in the fixin's. Again, the batter feels a lot like cookie dough at this point.

Drop chunks of it in prepared cupcake tins, filling about 3/4 full. Bake 15 minutes, turn pans, bake for 10 minutes and test to make sure cupcakes are done; if not, do another five minutes.

My experience with these cupcakes is that they are very, very crumbly. Everyone who tried them said they tasted great, but they really had no structural integrity. They were also very heavy, more like a brownie/blondie than a cupcake. I think if I made these again I would probably double the batter but keep the amount of fixin's the same, or use a lighter vanilla cupcake recipe and use the same fixin's. On the other hand, if you like a thick, cookie bar type of baked good that happens to be cupcake shaped, then change nothing!

Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes

Cream Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

Cream Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

This recipe was originally supposed to be for "jumbo" cupcakes; I have no idea where you'd get such tins, so I put them in regular tins. The recipe claimed to make only 12 cupcakes, so I assumed I'd better double it -- it ended up making 60 regular size cupcakes. SIXTY. Don't do this. I promise. It is horrifying.

That said, the cupcakes were really nice and fluffy, and the cream filling contrasted well. Plus, filling cupcakes is not nearly as daunting as it sounds.

Cupcakes:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter

3/4 cup cocoa powder

2 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 cup sour cream

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Sift together flour, cocoa, baking powder, and baking soda. In another bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs, beat until they're mixed in. Add the flour mixture and the sour cream alternately. The batter is super fluffy.

Fill your baking tins about 3/4 of the way up. Bake 10 minutes, turn, and bake for another 10 minutes.

Filling:

1 1/2 cups marshmallow cream

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter.

The butter should be room temperature. Beat it until it's fluffy and smooth, then add marshmallow cream and beat until fluffy. I used the whisk attachment on my mixer for this.

The recipe says you should then chill it for 15-30 minutes. I found this made it a bit hard to use in the piping bag.

To finish:

Use a melon baller/apple corer/small knife to scoop out the middle of the cupcakes. You should save the part you scoop out so you can put it back on top afterward.

Put the cream filling in a piping bag with a wide-ish tip. Use the bag to fill the cavity of each cupcake, then put the scooped-out part back on to seal the cupcakes. Pipe a squiggle on top. As you can see, I added sprinkles to mine, since Valentine's is coming up.

Here you can see three rows of cupcakes, one hollowed out, one filled with cream, and one with the extra cake put back on top to cover up the cream, so you can see roughly how I did it. Like I said, it is much easier than it sounds.

Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.

Chocolate Malted Cupcakes with Fluffy Vanilla Frosting

Chocolate Malted Cupcakes with Fluffy Vanilla Frosting

I reused the frosting from Thursday. It is hard to come up with a cool, creative frosting all the time! Trust me, it tastes good.

Cupcakes:

2 1/4 cups flour

3/4 cups cocoa powder

1/2 cup sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar, packed

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 cup milk

1 1/4 cups malted milk powder

1 cup vegetable oil

3 eggs

1 cup sour cream

1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Whisk together flour, cocoa, sugars, bp. In another bowl, whisk and milk and malted milk powder until it dissolves. Add in the dries and the oil and mix until well combined. It's a bit like brownie batter, very dark and thick. Add in the eggs one at a time, then the sour cream and vanilla. Mix well.

Fill the tins 3/4 of the way. Bake for 10 minutes, turn pans around, bake another ten minutes. Let cupcakes cool, then frost.

The recipe claims you will get 28 cupcakes; I got a whopping 43, so definitely take that with a grain of salt. Again, there was enough icing for the whole batch, nearly exactly, and I frosted pretty generously.

The malted flavor is really subtle, I think, but still distinct.

Repost of Frosting:

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, soft.
2 cups xxx sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Milk if needed
Food color if desired

Beat the butter and sugar together until pale and creamy. Add vanilla. If the frosting is too thick, thin it a little with milk/cream.

For these cupcakes, I used my silicups for the first time! They are reusable baking cups. I like them, although they definitely create a smaller than normal size of cupcake. I also think I would like to have more than one set, since my set only contains 12-- with that many cupcakes, it was a pain to take them and wash them after each batch, and I could only do one batch at a time. Still, I like the idea of not having to buy baking cups constantly (I go through a TON, as you can maybe imagine), so I think I will probably buy at least one more set. They clean really easily, and if you use a little spray non-stick the cupcakes come out quite cleanly.

Recipe adapted from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.