July Cupcake

cupcake of the month.4: peanut butter on chocolate

Here’s my cupcake of the month, just in the nick of time! I was really craving chocolate, last weekend, but never got around to making the cupcakes. I had some extra time, yesterday evening, and whipped these up. I used the chocolate cupcake recipe on joyofbaking.com and a peanut butter frosting recipe from allrecipes.com.

They came out pretty delicious. The cupcakes were moist and not overly sweet, which is a plus for me. The frosting tasted like the center of a Reese’s peanut butter cup, so that was pretty rad. My kids absolutely LOVED them. Especially Nathan, who usually isn’t into baked goods if they don’t involve a certain song and presents afterward. I’d call these a success.

!!PLUS!! Anytime I get to use all of my mixing bowls at once makes me smile inside. There’s something about these vintage Butterprint Pyrex bowls that gets my blood a-flowin’.

cupcake diptych


Red Hot April cupcake!

cupcake of the month.2: red hot!

The cupcake of the month (and maybe the year..) is Chocolate and Chilli! Again, I got the recipe from 500 Cupcakes. The batter was pretty hot and I was a little worried. Then, I ate a warm cupcake and it was kind of amazing. THEN, I made the frosting (!!) and oh my God! It was DELICIOUS! Like, all the flavors melted together and kindly left me ugghhhmmming in the kitchen for a few minutes. Yeah, I ate two cupcakes today. SUE ME!

The frosting calls for Tia Maria, a coffee liqueur. I’m sure you can find it in any liquor store, but we used it as a reason to go to our favorite liquor/specialty foods & cheeses store, Spec’s. We visit the downtown Houston location, which is a pretty big warehouse with endless amounts of beer, wine, liquor, gourmet foods, cheeses, and an awesome deli ($2.50 po-boys! get ‘em! they’re amazinggg). It was pricey, but I think it’s worth it. Same goes for the dutch-process cocoa and chipotle chilli powder. These are probably the priciest homemade cupcakes I’ve ever made! But. Seriously, guys. I wish I could email them to everyone I know because I think I’m going to marry it. They were that good.

I want to share the recipe, but that might be illegal, since it’s from a book. You should probably buy it, anyway. It’s cheap and there are 500 variations of cupcakes in it. A cupcake book! Everyone loves cupcakes.


‘Tis the season for Cupcakes!

cupcake

365.184: cupcake-open

365.197: cupcake family

If you would like to see more photographs, please click HERE.