cats cupcakes: Toffee Mocha Cupcakes

I have recently been contacted and asked to be involved with a Bakingmad.com campaign. Although I had heard of this website before from the recent Eric Lanlard tv programme (they sponsor it!), I had never taken a look at the website.

I was asked to re-create a recipe from the website and blog about it. After spending quite a bit of time looking through all of the yummy recipes on the website I thought I would try and find a cupcake recipe. I feel its been a while since I last made some cupcakes and am missing them!

There are plenty of yummy cupcake recipes on the Baking Mad website along with loads of helpful tips and solutions for all sorts of baking issues. If you've not had a look at this website then you definitely should.

In the end I settled on making the Toffee Mocha Cupcakes:

Toffee Mocha Cupcakes
Ingredients
100g butter unsalted
60g golden caster sugar
60g light muscovado sugar
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
200g self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
50g dark chocolate, chopped or chocolate chips
For the butter cream
3 tsp cocoa powder, sifted
3 tsp hot water
3 tsp espresso coffee powder
150 grams butter unsalted
300 grams golden icing sugar
Fudge pieces, grated chocolate and toffee sauce to decorate

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 C/ 170 C fan/ Gas mark 4. Line the muffin tin with muffin papers, or grease and flour each hole individually.
Cream the butter and sugar together in a large mixing bowl until light and fluffy.
Beat together the eggs and vanilla extract.
Gradually add the flour and eggs into the butter and sugar mixing all the time.
Gently stir in the chocolate.
Spoon into the muffin papers, about two-thirds full. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes.

To make the icing, mix together the cocoa, expresso powder and hot water until dissolved for the mocha flavouring. Beat together the butter, icing sugar and mocha flavouring, until well blended. Fill the piping bag, and pipe onto the cupcakes.
Grate chocolate over the icing and scatter on some fudge pieces. Finally drizzle on some toffee sauce.

I did change the recipe slightly, rather than completely following the one on the Baking Mad website - I'm a chocaholic and felt the cake needed some chocolate adding to it so I mixed in 50 grams of chopped up chocolate. Also I changed the method - I made these the first time following the original method which said to melt the butter and sugar in a pan and then stir them into the beaten eggs. Even though I let the butter and sugar mixture cool as the recipe instructed, I still felt it cooked my eggs and left me with a really lumpy cake batter. The second time I made the cakes I creamed the butter and sugar together first, rather than melting them.

I also tripled the ingredient quantities for the butter cream (the quantities above provide the amount of butter cream I used) - I do like a LOT of buttercream on my cupcakes!! And then as well as grating dark chocolate onto the butter cream, for extra naughtiness I also added fudge chunks and a simple home made toffee sauce to to make them a bit more toffee-ish! The toffee sauce was made by melting 120g of light brown sugar with 120g of butter in a pan. Once melted, I added 100ml of cream and heated till it was bubbling and then took of the heat and allowed to cool.

Over all I really liked these cupcakes - the coffee-ish chocolatey butter cream was really good, especially with toffee sauce drizzled over it. I think if I was making them again though I would tweak the cake recipe - for me they were a bit too muffin like in texture, rather than a cupcake. I think some toffee sauce in the centre of the cupcake would be good too..yum!