Chocolate Butterfly Cupcakes

Hullo, my Pixels!

Another tasty recipe my cousin and I decided to try out. Again, like with the hazelnut shortcakes, we had a bit of artistic license with the original recipe. My cousin actually didn't have any dark chocolate to melt into the cakes (shameful, I know!) so we had to improvise a bit with chocolate and caramel spread.

INGREDIENTS

• 125g soft margarine
• 125g caster sugar
• 150g self-raising flour
• 2 large eggs
• 2tbsp cocoa powder
• 25g dark chocolate, melted (or caramel and chocolate spread in our case)

Frosting:

• 100g unsalted butter, softened
• 225g icing sugar
• Whipped cream (optional - we only used it to make the frosting lighter)

METHOD

1. Gather all of your ingredients together and preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4. My cousin and I weren't having a good day - not only did we not have any chocolate to melt, we also didn't have any self-raising flour, so we had to use plain flour and baking powder instead. Also, the original recipe makes twelve cakes, but we doubled everything to make enough for my family aswell because we're all little piggies!

2. Place all of the ingredients for the cakes, except for the chocolate, in a large mixing bowl and beat the mixture until smooth. This is when you would melt the chocolate, either in a microwave or in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water, but I just mixed in the caramel and chocolate spread after melting it for 30 seconds in the microwave. Not necessary to microwave the spread, it just makes it a lot easier to mix in smoothly.

3. Place your cake cases into a fitting muffin tray. We even managed to run out of the correct size plain cake cases, which is why some are little tiny cake cases, and others are square Christmas themed cases. We really weren't prepared for this recipe, clearly!

4. Spoon your mixture into your cases, making sure they're all about 3/4 full so they don't overflow or turn out too small. Bake them for about 15 minutes or until they're springy to the touch.

5. To make the frosting, just mix all of the ingredients together to create a thick enough mixture. Once the cakes are cooled, cut out a little circle from the middle of the cakes, not too deep, and cut this piece in half to create the 'butterfly wings'. We decided to put some more melted caramel and chocolate spread into the newly created holes in the cupcakes, before spreading over a layer of frosting and pushing in the wings to finish the cakes.

As you can see, the different shape and size cupcake cases made them all turn out slightly differently, but they were all pretty tasty - soooooooo messy though, the frosting got everywhere! Hopefully you enjoyed this recipe, even though we had difficulty with the ingredients.

Sommer

♥