Spiced Chocolate Cupcakes

So I planned to hit the diet hard this week. Second day into it, I got the urge to bake cupcakes. Eat one and donate the other eleven to various local cupcake loving friends is the plan. Only there's still four left on the counter. That diet can start again tomorrow.

I experimented with these cakes. I have a recipe for a mexican chocolate cake that I wanted to try but I couldn't find it. I wanted something a little different that the usual. I went to Cupcake Bakeshop because that girl seriously has the best cupcake ideas, ever. Her chai cakes sounded good and made me think of the spiced hot chocolate we make at work. Bingo. Spiced chocolate cupcakes it is. It's not an over-powering flavour but it really works well with the dark chocolate cake.

Recipe?

for the spice mix: in a coffee grinder whizz up two cinnamon sticks, one dried red chilli, one star anise, four cardamom pods and three cloves.

for the cake:

115g butter
60g dark chocolate
1/2 cup cocoa

2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla

3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp spice mix

1/2 cup yoghurt

melt together the chocolate, butter and cocoa, whisking well to combine. Set aside to cool.

meanwhile, whisk the eggs together, then whisk in the sugar and vanilla essence. Add to the chocolate mixture once it's cool.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and soda.

Add one third of the flour to the chocolate and egg mixture then half the yoghurt, another third of flour, the rest of the yoghurt and the rest of the flour, mixing well between additions.

Fill yer cupcake cases and bake in a 180 C oven for 18 minutes.

Spiced buttercream:

125g unsalted butter
500g icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 1/2 tsp spice mixture
1 - 2 TBS milk

beat the butter and vanilla essence with an electric mixer until creamy. Add the icing sugar and spice mixture and 1 TBS of milk. Beat until well combined. You might need another TBS of milk, depends on what kind of texture you like in your frosting. That's it!

Old Work in New Ways

Years ago, around 1998-1999, I used to make fonts. I snagged a copy of Fontographer from somewhere and I set about producing a rag tag bunch of mostly hand drawn fonts. I distributed them for free and they floated around the net for a while until I lost my website a few years ago (long story). I don't even have copies of most of them anymore, I made them on a PC which died and now I have a Mac and there's the aforementioned lost website. So today I recieved a lovely package in the mail today from a designer that works for the French kid's magazine Pirouette.

Turns out they used one of my fonts in their current issue and sent me a couple of issues so I could see it for myself. How cute is that? Here's a close-up:

I'm really quite proud!