Black forest cupcakes

I wanted something nice to give to a friend (waves at Bob) for driving us all the way out to Waipara River (in a convertible…man that was fun), and also for a dinner party this evening. However, I wanted to make lots without too much effort (melting chocolate and butter together for example) and without any leftover stuff that I would struggle to use later. With a box full of cherries at home (it’s cherry season, yay!), and plenty of cocoa, all I had to do for these was bike out for some chocolate buttons (have i mentioned yet how awful Nestle button are? Even the supermarket brand buttons are better, although I have a healthy respect for signature range, being a student and all). Thanks to Ann at Velvet lava for the inspiration!

Anyway, enough babble. Let’s get these babies in the oven! Get all your pans out, this recipe makes 36-38 smallish medium muffins! You can halve the recipe too if you want.

Chocolate cupcake bit (a chocolate cake recipe found at Chelsea.co.nz)
2 1/2 c plain flour (high grade works too)
2 c caster sugar or fine grained raw sugar
3/4 c cocoa
2 tsp baking soda
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 c melted unsalted butter (approx 100g) or omit salt if using salted butter
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 c warm water
1 Tbs mayonnaise, condensed milk, thick creamy natural yoghurt, sour cream,or creme fraiche

Preheat oven to 180C or 350F. Put ingredients in specified order into a LARGE bowl, food processor or stand mixer and mix until uniform. Batter will be very liquidy – that’s fine! Pour into paper lined muffin tins, filling 3/4 of the way. Using 36-38 cherries, put one in each muffin, stalk included. Pop in oven 20 minutes total, or until knife inserted comes out clean (leave one muffin cherry-less as a tester). Rotate half way in between. You can do two trays at a time by rotating and swapping trays half way through cooking time. Cool cupcakes on a rack before icing.

Chocolate ganache icing

250g dark chocolate buttons (avoid Nestle) or chocolate broken up
approx 100ml cream
approx 20g butter – normally I don’t use this, but it means the icing hardens quicker than just using cream. If short on time use 100g butter, no cream.

In a small saucepan on the lowest heat setting possible, melt butter, cream, and chocolate together, until you get a liquidy icing (that doesn’t keep its shape). Add cream to make it more liquidy if necessary. Lift pan off heat occasionally to prevent the chocolate from overheating (sign of overheating: chocolate doesn’t come away from the bottom of the pan easily).

Spoon onto cooled cupcakes, and let icing solidify.