Chocolate surprise cupcakes

Okay so I know, I know it's been a while and I promised to get better at this. I apologize, and unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances (and the fact that I suck) I haven't been able to keep up with the daily challenge. I didn't realize how much time baking/selling would take out of my day and with that and school and trying to actually get my friend to come out of his cave to do something other than watch Adventure Time and Austin and Ally I've been kind of swamped.

And here soon I'll be working on SAT, skateboarding, and a college application. But! I'm going to start reminding myself to try to actually blog. I know it's pretty bad and if I ever actually had an audience (however small) I probably lost it by my sucky posting. So it goes. 

But back to the point of this post! I've been doing a whole lot of baking lately and before this, I never really realized just how exhausting baking can be. I don't know what it is about it, but it can really wear you out. But it is fun and business is going well, so I can't really complain. Yeahhh... So again, back to the point! My mom and I decided that we wanted to do some baking just for ourselves because I have eaten a grand total of one of my own muffins and we bought a giant muffin tin that we've been dying to use. 

So we had some Snickers around that had been bought on impulse a few weeks ago, and I thought why not? We looked up a super delicious chocolate cupcake recipe on allshecooks.com and decided to trade the Hershey's kisses for chunks of Snickers. Now, with them being jumbo and chocolate the baking time was a little harder to guess and they did turn out a little dry. But they are still certainly worth it and I have to say its definitely a keeper! The way we did it, it made 8 cupcakes (6 jumbo and 2 regular), but if you're making just normal cupcakes I think it would make about 15-16 cupcakes more or less. Or 7 jumbo. And as not to steal her thunder because she did such a lovely job, I'm just putting up the ingredients so you can waltz over to her lovely site and check out how to make these scrumptious cupcakes. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of butter (1 stick)
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 3/4 cup cocoa (we used just a tad bit less and it still turned out wonderfully chocolatey)
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 snickers bar, cut in slices. (if you are making the full recipe but in small cupcakes then you will need at least 2 Snickers or smaller slices)

As you are pouring them into the cupcake tin only fill about half then drop in the Snickers slice and then fill the rest of the way. 

Strawberry vanilla cupcake recipe

Hi all! Sorry that this is kind of a weird post. I'm sort of out of whack thanks to being sort of "on vacation" you could say so my schedule is kind of weird with driving up and down everywhere to visit my brothers who happen to be in different directions of the state. Fun times. But seriously I will try to at least post once a week, if not twice a week when I can. I have a few things I've been wanting to try out now that I'm here, and have access to an actual art store and places to buy different ingredients I can't get at home. 

Anyways, back to the post at hand! On the 12th we left for the states, which also happened to be one of my best friend's birthday unfortunately. So to make up for the lack of me being there on her birthday, I decided to bake some cupcakes for her and her family the day before I had to leave. Now, I've recently gotten into this thing of baking, but I don't like baking normal people things. I don't want to just make a vanilla cupcake. I want to make a vanilla cupcake with homemade blackberry jam filling and homemade blackberry frosting. I don't just make chocolate cupcakes. I make chocolate blackberry cupcakes. I don't just do a chocolate cake. It has to be a Swedish chocolate cake (which I found out is delicious when you first get it out of the oven, but if you let it cool off too long, which i waited until much later to actually serve it, the cake becomes about as hard as a rock.). So you get the general idea. I like baking things (mostly cupcakes) with a bit of a twist. 

And that is why I got so excited when I accidentally stumbled on this recipe for a cupcake base. Basically all you have to do is make this base up and then add your flare to it. And that's when I had a light bulb moment! I wanted to make strawberry vanilla cupcakes. The unfortunate thing is that this recipe is only in grams for the dry ingredients. Why? I don't really know. It probably has something to do with being more precise or something. So that's a tad bit of a pain, but with a little digging I found a site that you can figure out how many grams (or whatever) it takes for cups (or whatever you're wanting) and this website has different calculators for sugar, flour, and butter. So that's pretty nifty if you need to convert things like that.

For this batch I was only making six cupcakes so I had to mess with the recipe and decided to just borrow my dad's electric weighing thing (very technical term right there.) instead.

Ingredients (if you're doing the full batch): 

• 125g butter, softened (a little over a stick)
• 125g caster sugar (a little over half a cup)
• 2 medium eggs
• 125g self-raising flour (1 cup)
• 2 tbsp milk

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 375 F/190 C

Step 2: Beat your eggs and sugar until they are light and fluffy

Step 3: Add the eggs, flour, and milk and beat until smooth. 

All right now for the yummy part! 
Step 4: Add in about 1/2 a cup of strawberry pureed (thrown in the blender) and 2 teaspoons of vanilla. Mix in.

 Step 5: place into cupcake tins and in oven for 12-15 minutes or until risen and the center is firm to the touch. 

Step 6: Wait until cool and then ice. I used a simple vanilla icing from scratch but there are some really amazing strawberry icing recipes (I might experiment and put one up sometime). I ha planned to place  strawberry on top of them, but i used all I had in the actual batter so that didn't work. 

The birthday girl's cupcake!

And the lovely birthday girl!

Please let me know how this went if you try it! From the batter I tasted it turned out pretty well, but unfortunately I forgot to make any extra for me to actually try (yeah, I know, that's kind of bad). So hopefully this recipe is correct and turns out well for all y'all!