I am always looking for a good excuse for baking anything chocolate so when The Husband invited one of his friends over and told me that she loves chocolate I jumped on the opportunity to make cupcakes. All in the name of being a good hostess of course.
A while back my Mom gave me Martha Stewart's cupcake cookbook so I flipped through the pages to get a recipe and quickly decided to make Devil's Food Cupcakes with Chocolate Ganache frosting.
The cupcakes start off with a base of cocoa powder dissolved in hot water as pictured above.
Afterwards you take a generous amount of butter and sugar and melt them together.
This then goes in the mixer to be beaten for a few minutes while it cools down. I failed to see the point of this step but I decided to follow it anyways.
Afterwards I added eggs and beat the mixture some more. I fished out the little piece of eggshell that fell in after I had taken this picture.
Next the cocoa and water mix went in...
followed by alternating batches of flour and sour cream. I used low fat sour cream instead of full fat; I do try to cut back sometimes. Yeah, I know, using low fat sour cream instead of full fat in a cupcake recipe really doesn't accomplish much but it is a salve to my guilty conscience and allows me to sleep at night.
Here is the batter right before it went into the muffin tins. I of course licked the beaters afterwards. The Husband thinks I'm weird because I do this since he is quite possibly the only person on Earth with an aversion to raw batter/cookie dough.
The recipe was supposed to make 15 cupcakes but since I hate recipes with weird numbers I just fit the batter into a 12 cup muffin tin.
This might explain why my cupcakes were so big. Up next was the frosting.
Ganache is rather easy to make. It requires massive amount of finely chopped chocolate and...
some cream. The hardest part is trying not to eat it with a spoon. The cream is heated up and then added to the chocolate and stirred up until it is all melted.
Doesn't that look delicious? I love how shiny it is.
The only tricky part is making sure that the texture is correct for frosting the cupcakes. Ganache firms up as it cools down but if you frost them too quickly the ganache will drip off, if you wait too long the ganache will be too firm.
I had a *very* hard time not eating one before dinner started. When I finally had one I was rather pleased. They are chocolatey and sweet but not cloyingly so. As a bonus there was ganache left over which is sitting in my fridge right now. Chocolate has to be one of the best things in life.
