Chocolate Cupcakes

Play dates gotto have cupcakes. What’s better than cupcakes? Nothing. Actually something.. Chocolate Cupcakes. With Frosting. With Sprinkles. With a cherry on top.

Perfect.

I usually don’t have the patience to do little cupcakes. I just take a trip to my closest grocery store and pick these things up. But, this time I was determined. Maybe just because I wanted to blog about it and I can’t really blog much about Albertsons cupcakes.

But, confession after baking these – these are addictive right out of the oven – naked. No frosting – no nothing. Just the cupcake. My husband does not even like chocolate but ended up eating maybe 3 of these right out of the oven. Maybe it’s just the fresh baked smell…hmm….divine. Or the fact that its late in the evening – and we just finished dinner and these make perfect deserts. Whatever the excuse is – these are addictive.
I had to keep my family away from these cupcakes so I can have at least one each for the kids coming for the play date. Instead I gave my family the frosting left on the bowl and they licked it up well. I even have pictures to prove it but will refrain from posting…unless you all want to be grossed out!

I took the recipe for these cupcakes from my favorite baking recipes site – verybestbaking.com. Here’s the link to the recipe – Rich Chocolate Cupcakes

And before we proceed, sorry for so many pictures below – I can’t resist myself – bitten by the cupcake bug.

Here's a picture of all required ingredients.

Mix all the dry ingredients together -

1 1/2 cups All purpose flour

2/3 cup baking cocoa

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

In another mixing bowl, add all these ingredients to beat together.

1 1/2 cups Sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

Beat it all up together until nice and fluffy.

Add about half of the dry mixture to the butter eggs mixture. Once again, beat together well till combined.

We need to alternate the dry mixture with a cup of milk. Pour in half a cup of milk and beat well. Then, add the remaining dry mix and beat well. Then again, add the remaining half cup of milk and beat well.

I lined my muffin pan with little paper-line muffin cups.

Scoop in about 3/4 each of the cups and bake in a 350F preheated oven. You can see them rising up a little bit. My daughter told me that these are donuts if you eat it at this stage. If you keep it a little more, then they become cupcakes. Hmm...

They are done when they pass the toothpick test!

Cool them on a rack for about 30 minutes before topping with frosting.

I made frosting from scratch one time and used so much butter it scared me. This time I just bought it from the store. The store one also probably has that much or even more butter or sugar but at least I don't see it directly and somehow that soothes me. I got the cream cheese based frosting - isn't cheese all protein? What ..not this one. Oh whatever.

I got just the plain vanilla frosting and also got the four color pack food colors. On the back of the package, it shows you how to get different colors by mixing the base color. So, after some serious thought, my daughter decided she wanted peach, coral and purple. So, we set out to do that!

I took about 2 -3 tsp of frosting in a bowl and mixed the colors in as needed.

Doesn't this just look nice. I added this picture just for the heck of it.

There's peach..or coral..wait I think this is peach. The other 'pinker' one is coral. ( 4 1/2 yr old terminology)

Apply the frosting on the top of the cupcake. For prettier cupcakes, you can use a piping tip and pipe them on - but I kind of just kept is sloppy - that's the look I was going for (yeah right!)

Here are the three colors all on top of the cupcakes.

Add some sprinkles on top - get your kids to do this - they love it - my daughter had a blast helping me with this!

Add a cherry on top and you are done!

Ooh..Purpulicious!

Miss. Peach.

Coral Baby Coral

I saved them in a chip and dip container.

The kids loved the cupcakes. Some did not like cherries - so my daughter ate theirs too. Some licked all the frosting and left out the cupcakes. Haha..Some finished the whole thing and wanted one more!

Perfect play date!

Peace out!

I'm sending this as an entry to the Cooking for Kids event hosted by Divya of Dil Se and also to Sharmi who originated the idea - Thanks Divya ans Sharmi for hosting!