Brownie Cupcakes with Chocolate Orange
Ganache Centres and Blood Orange Frosting
OK. So I bake cakes. I decorate cakes. I eat cakes. I do all of those things very well. What I don't do so well is cupcakes. I'm not sure why, because they're essentially mini cakes, but my cupcakes never turn out pretty. They're tasty, but never pretty. And I am on a mission to change that. I am on a cupcake kick.
Predating my cupcake kick is my blood orange kick. There's a place in Saskatoon called Jerry's Food Emporium and everytime I go through town (ok, not that often) I must stop for some of their "artisan ice cream". My personal favourite is the blood orange sorbet (especially with a scoop of dark chocolate sorbet), and I spent a while last October looking for blood oranges in town only to discover that they were out of season. Well, they're in season now so I picked up a bag when I was at the grocery store last week. Made some nice Blood Orange Frozen Yogurt but haven't had time to whip up the sorbet yet. So, when I decided to make cupcakes tonight, I thought that it would be fun to incorporate the blood oranges. They're just so tasty, as well as pretty. I love the colour- so much more red than this photo captures!
Tonight has been my first chance to bake since the cupcake kick started, so I called home from work to make sure we had the necessary ingredients that are often depleted. As per usual, we were out of icing sugar, so I stopped on the way home to pick some up. Now, I fully intended to use my favourite dark chocolate cake recipe to make the cupcakes, so as we finished dinner, I went to the pantry to get the cocoa out. And, horror of all horrors, we were out. I just opened a new container the last time I made a chocolate cake, so I have no idea where all the cocoa went. But it's gone. Not feeling like going to the store for the third time today, I decided to take the lazy way out and use the chocolate cake mix that has been hiding in the back of the cupboard. But it too, is gone. I think there is some evil anti-baking fairy who has been stealing all things chocolate from my house, other than the 2kg bag of chocolate chips. It's not fair.
Not to be dissuaded, I went online to do some searching for a non-cocoa chocolate cupcake recipe. With severe reservations (but too lazy to keep searching) I decided to use a mint brownie cupcake recipe from the Chipits website, with a few alterations, seeing as I don't want mint grasshopper cupcakes.
The recipe I ended up using went something like this:
Melt together 1 cup chocolate chips and 1/2 cup margarine in the microwave (or on the stove). Mix until smooth. Stir in 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tsp finely chopped blood orange rind, 1 tsp vanilla and 2 eggs. Mix until smooth (about two minutes).
This is where the original Chipits recipe called for me to pour the batter into 24 large cupcake papers. I was skeptical of this before I even started melting anything, and sure enough, I barely got 12 large cupcakes out of this recipe. Bake them for about 18 minutes at 350, or until the toothpick test says they're ready. Let them cool before decorating.
For the chocolate orange ganache, I altered a recipe that I've previously used for truffles. I don't know where it came from originally, but tonight's version went like this:
Put 1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk in saucepan and bring just to a boil. Stir in 1/2 cup chocolate chips and 1 tbsp triple sec or orange extract. Stir until smooth and then let it cool. I then cut out the centres of the cupcakes and filled them with a teaspoon-ish of ganache, attempted to put the cake lid back on, and covered them with the blood orange frosting.
The blood orange frosting (very sweet, but very tasty) was this:
Cream 1/4 cup butter or marg and mix in 1 cup icing sugar. Add juice of one blood orange (about 1/4 cup) and then another 1 1/2 cups icing sugar. Whip it up until smooth. (I discovered after icing one cupcake that I didn't have enough frosting to put mounds of it on each cupcake and had to resort to an even layer. Next time, more frosting! Maybe double the recipe?)
I drizzled melted chocolate across the tops for the final effect. The frosting didn't turn out as pink in the photos as it really was, which is disappointing, but not surprising.
So there we are. A pretty cupcake (and pretty tasty too, even if I am disappointed about the brownie cupcake instead of the dark chocolate cake one). I'm pretty certain that my problem in the past has been trying to pipe on icing that is too thick. Anyways, I think I've had a productive night and we'll see what sort of reviews the girls give at work tomorrow.
Well, it's time to sleep now, but that picture sure looks like breakfast to me...
- Carolyn
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