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.