Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

This year has been, though massively tough – pretty god damn awesome. Taking redundancy was one of the best decisions I ever made, I didn’t realise that it was going to be so hard to find work but I’ve survived through love of Friends & Family and BAKING. My baking has grown leaps and bounds since March of this year – I’d never made a proper cupcake before June and since then I’ve made MANY and amazingly people have actually paid me money to do so.

My talented friend Erica asked me to bake her Festive Cupcakes for her acting class – some Red Velvet  and some Mint Chocolate. I hunted high and low for the perfect recipe and then I stumbled upon this recipe and lovely little video from Chasing Delicious

Mint Chocolate Cupcakes
makes 16 cupcakes

90g / 3oz cocoa powder
150g / 5oz plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
225g / 8oz unsalted butter – at room temp
300g / 10oz golden caster sugar
4 large eggs – at room temp
½ tsp vanilla paste (1 tsp extract)
½ tsp peppermint extract
175ml / 6 fl oz buttermilk
115g / 4oz plain cooking chocolate – finely chopped or blitzed

Mint Frosting

225g / 8oz unsalted butter – at room temp
500g / 18oz icing sugar
2 tbsp double cream
1 tsp peppermint extract
tiny blob of Mint Green colour paste

Preheat the oven to 180°c / 350°f / gas mark 4 and line 2 muffin trays with 16 muffin cases.

Sift the cocoa, flour, baking powder & salt together and set aside. Cream the butter & sugar until fluffy, roughly about 5 minutes.

Add the eggs, one at a time – incorporating fully before adding the next egg and then beat in both of the extracts.

Add half of the dry mixture to the egg mixture and mix until combined.

Add the chocolate to the remaining dry mixture and set aside.

Then combine the buttermilk fully to the wet ingredients and finally add the remaining dry ingredients and chopped chocolate.

Spoon into the cases – Be quite generous but don’t overfill, a slight muffin top is desirable here.

Bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Let the cakes cool fully and prepare the frosting by combining all the ingredients together.

Once cooled pipe, spread, dollop your frosting on top of each cupcake and decorate however you wish – I made Candy Canes for the ones I gave Erica – using white sugar paste and then painting on the red stripes using red christmas colour paste.

I hope you enjoy making, eating and sharing these cupcakes as much as I did. Let me know how you get on if you do try these out and have yourselves a Merry Little Christmas Time. x