Double Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

Recipe Review: Chocolate and Peanut Butter- the perfect combination. 

I had been planning on making cupcakes for Easter every since I got into cupcake decorating. There were so many cute ideas, I wanted to make them all and I couldn't decide. Also I couldn't figure out what flavor to try and make. I started out trying to make the plastic Easter egg cupcakes featured in Whats New Cupcake. What you're supposed to do is coat the inside of plastic eggs with melting candy to make a candy egg that looks like a plastic egg. That was a great big fail. The chocolate stuck in the egg and wouldn't come out without breaking even though I had followed the directions to a T. Realizing this was just going to stress me out I scrapped that idea and moved on to the much simpler birds nest cupcakes. Although its Easter and that lends itself to light fruit flavors I decided to try a chocolate cupcake since I hadn't done one yet.

Double Chocolate Cupcakes

adapted from Martha Stewart

yield: 18-24 cupcakes

3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 1/2 cups all purpose flower

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs at room temperature

3/4 cup warm water

3/4 cup whole milk

1 tablespoon vinegar

2 tablespoons sour cream

3 tablespoons safflower oil

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 cups mini semi sweet morsels

Preheat over to 350 degrees. Line muffin tins with paper liners.

Sift together cocoa powder, flour, sugar baking soda, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Combine milk and vinegar and let sit for 5 minutes.* Add eggs, warm water, milk & vinegar mixture, sour cream, oil and vanilla to bowl and mix well until smooth, about 3 minutes. Scrape down the bottom of the bowl to ensure batter is well mixed. Gently fold in 2/3 cup of mini morsels.

Pour batter into muffin cups, filling 2/3rds full. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of mini morsels on top. Bake until the tops spring back when pressed lightly, about 20 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool completely before frosting.

*Note: If you prefer you can skip this step by buying buttermilk- but I don't have anything else that I would use buttermilk for so I did the milk and vinegar trick.

Peanut Butter Frosting

adapted from allrecipes.com

1 cup butter softened

2 cups smooth Peanut Butter- softened but not melted

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 cups confectioners sugar

2-4 tablespoons milk

Cream butter and peanut butter and vanilla. Add in sugar one cup at a time alternating with milk. Beating well with each addition. Add more milk if frosting is too thick until desired consistency is reached.

printable recipe

In general I'm not a fan of chocolate cake. Maybe its because I like deep, dense, moist, dark chocolate and most chocolate cakes just aren't chocolatey enough. I was worried when I was making the batter because it was very thin compared to the other from scratch cupcakes that I've made. They ended up tasting great though! Actually the addition of the peanut butter frosting might have made them a little to rich (or perhaps this is my fault since I like the way cupcakes look when they have lots of frosting on them.) I think these would work well as mini cupcakes, since they are so rich. I used a 4B Wilton tip to pipe the frosting onto the cupcakes, starting from the middle and working out to make a "nest" then I used my microplane to grate some chocolate shavings onto the tops and finished by putting 4 cadbury mini eggs in the nest.

I have some news... Starting to Simmer is about to change kitchens- I'm moving in with Kevin at the end of the month! I realized when I packed up my Kitchen Aid mixer today that there will probably be lots of take out and not so much cooking for the next few weeks while I settle in. New posts might be scarce but don't worry i'll be back soon!