Baking With The Muffin - Dark & White Fudge Cupcakes

One of the gifts my four year old got for her birthday this year was a cupcake kit (I know, it's hilarious, right? She's four and she owns three cookbooks and four aprons. What can I say?). This one included a recipe book called "Delicious Cupcakes" by Susanna Tee, and some paper cupcake cases, all packaged in quite a nice pink tin.

This is not something I would have bought for myself, but it's quite a nice little book for a beginner or someone who's fairly non-experimental in the kitchen (or, indeed, for a child)... And some of the recipes look quite good actually - we tried the coconut cherry cupcakes a while back, and they were pretty good, although we used our own chocolate frosting rather than the vanilla buttercream the book suggested.

Yesterday we tried out one of the chocolate recipes: Dark & White Fudge Cupcakes. The book described them as "little, light and moist cupcakes, with a tempting fudgy chocolate topping".

I have this to say about them: Weirdest Recipe Ever.

It doesn't contain any eggs. And you don't really beat anything. Basically you make a kind of buttery syrup in a saucepan, add it to the dry ingredients, stir it until it's smooth, and bake it. The topping involves making two different mixtures of chocolate, butter and water (one dark, one white), adding icing sugar to each, and beating them "until smooth and thick". What I really had trouble with was that this mixture kept solidifying before I got it onto the cakes, so I had to keep zapping it in the microwave (after Every Second Cupcake). And then it solidified really quickly on the cakes, so the chocolate curls wouldn't stick. Which I suppose doesn't really matter, but it would have been nice.


Was it worth it? No, not really. I mean, they're pleasant enough - I'm not refusing to eat them or anything. But they're incredibly process-heavy for such an ordinary little cake, and also pretty dishes-heavy, and frankly when a recipe is this much trouble, I like it to turn out Wow These Are Really Yummy, not just Yeah, They're Okay.

On the upside, The Muffin was happy - she wasn't massively keen on the white topping (weirdly, as white chocolate is actually her favourite type), but thought the dark ones were brilliant (her attitude being, "It's got chocolate in it - How Bad Can It Be?")

Hopefully our next experiment from this book will be more exciting - maybe the walnut cupcakes, or the citrussy pineapple ones...?