Fantasy cupcakes

Old-fashioned chocolate cupcakes with chocolate buttercream

Cuspcake rating: 2.5

Now these were requested by my favourite almost-5-year-old. She gets a cupcake every week at least, usually the prettiest one which is photographed for this blog, and was so enamoured of the melt-in-the-mouth choc mini that she wanted to treat her friends to cupcakes.

Spent rather a long time deciding on a combination of flavours – I wanted to be certain her little pals would be impressed. Settled on the old-fashioned chocolate cupcakes from cupcakeblog, and chocolate buttercream from my new book Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery, a steal at just $15.94 and my 30th birthday gift to myself. Topped them off with hundreds and thousands, and mini M&Ms (rather anally arranged all in the same order too).

In my eagerness to please, I also led to my own first failed cupcakes – I'd stuffed marshmallows in the centre of each of the first batch, hoping for a gooey melted marshmallow filling, but ended up with eruptions all around instead. 

I later discovered with my second batch that this recipe is somewhat prone to coming over the top of the cups and developing a bubbly, sticky top (others have commented on the same on Cupcakeblog). Perhaps this is because of the sugar, or perhaps because my oven has a fan and should be set to a slightly lower temperature (noticed that in Cupcakes from the Primrose Bakery temperatures are offered in various conversions and there's usually a 20ºC difference with fan). Thankfully they didn't affect the taste and the little 'uns, it is reported, liked them.

I found them rather too sweet and sticky, and the chocolate buttercream wasn't to my taste either (is it ever?). But hey, I'm slowly discovering that baking for kids is a whole different affair. As as long as my tiny was happy, I'm happy. These were my most rewarding batch ever to make. I hear she was delighted when she saw them, and I was thrilled to make them – they brought back lovely memories of being a child in kindergarten and having a cake to share on my birthday, complete with fancy buttercream icing, my name piped on in cursive, and even a fancy topper like a little rubber Strawberry Shortcake figurine. :)