Choco butter cupcakes

For those of you who made the buttery cupcakes and found them a bit too heavy, here’s good news. I found another basic yellow cake recipe which I adapted and baked into cupcakes. The result was a lighter texture with the same crusty, slightly crisp exterior.

This is based on a recipe from The Joy of Baking. I especially enjoyed doing this recipe because it is quite a departure from traditional cake mixing techniques.

The addition of chocolate was my idea — my way of putting to good use an large bar of Nestle dark chocolate that no one seemed to be interested in anymore.

Preheat the oven to 180^oC. From experience, that’s the safest temperature for baking cupcakes and muffins.

Measure 1/2 cup of milk. Take two tablespoonfuls and pour into a mixing bowl. Add 3 egg yolks and about a teaspoonful of vanilla extract. Mix well.

Cut 3/4 of a 225-gram block of chilled butter into small pieces then allow to warm to room temperature. It’s easier to cut butter straight from the fridge.

In a large mixing bowl, place 1-1/2 cups of cake flour. If you don’t have cake flour, place a tablespoonful of corn starch in a measuring cup and add enough all-purpose flour to measure one cup. That’s equal to 1 cup of cake flour. Do the math so that you have 1-1/2 cups of cake flour. To the flour in the bowl, add 3/4 cup of white sugar, 1/3 teaspoonful of salt and 1-1/2 tablespoonfuls of baking powder. Mix the dry ingredients well. You can use an electric mixer on low speed — I did — but the cloud of flour that flew off demanded unnecessary cleanup. So, I suggest doing this by hand.

Add the softened butter and remaining milk to the flour. Now, this is where an electric mixer becomes handy. Run the mixer on low speed to mix the butter and milk with the dry ingredients. The mixture will be very thick at this point. Turn up the speed to medium and continue mixing for about a minute. Pour in the egg-milk-vanilla mixture. The original recipe says to do this in three segments, mixing after each addition. I poured the egg-milk-vanilla mixture in a thin stream instead without turning off the electric mixer.

The batter will still be thicker than usual and definitely NOT of pouring consistency.

Now, take a well-chilled bar of plain eating chocolate. Without removing the wrapping, run a rolling pin over the chocolate bar. Or, you can remove the wrapping and chop the chocolate in a chopping board. Of course, you can always use chocolate morsels. It just so happened that I had bars of dark chocolate in the fridge that my family had gotten tired off and I wanted to put them to use. So, I used an entire bar — it’s a large one — for the cupcakes. Stir in the chopped chocolate into the cake batter.

Spoon the batter into a muffin pan until they are almost full. I used a non-stick pan; if yours isn’t non-stick, use paper cups for lining.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 25 minutes or until the tops start to brown lightly in spots.

The nice thing about these cupcakes is that you get soft gooey chocolate with almost every bite. Kids can’t resist that.

In the mood for more food?

1. Frances loaf from Julie’s Bakeshop
2. Pork, asparagus and mushrooms stirfry
3. Chinese tea eggs and roast chicken
4. Gonuts Donuts cupcakes
5. Steamed pompano with ginger sauce
6. Kangkong (water or swamp spinach)
7. Peaches and cream
8. Packed school lunches
9. Fish fillets in kalamansi sauce
10. Mother Earth cheese hotdogs

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House On A Hill

Amateur baker

• Banana nut muffins, fresh bananas, coffee and some thoughts about baking
• Tri-level brownies
• Lemon squares
• My first apple pie
• Chocolate crinkles
• Chocolate fudge brownies
• Chicken and cheese on toasted bread cups
• Vanilla-mocha marble chiffon cake
• Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies
• Vanilla and mocha chiffon cupcakes

Oh, so sweet!

• Mango and jelly (jango) dessert
• Mango custard
• Chocolate coated gummy bears
• Easy dessert crepes
• Coffee jelly dessert
• Mango-rum sorbet
• Mocha pudding
• Green tea and rambutan dessert
• Peaches and cream
• Choco-mocha-cinnamon pudding