Mint chocolate cupcakes

Yesterday was Mother's Day. Following on from an incredibly busy day on Saturday (three parties and a whole pile of action), Mother's Day involved lots of food while visiting both our families. Exhausting!

To celebrate Mother's Day, I wanted to try making a special kind of cupcake recipe which would also allow me to experiment with decorating. I used Tamara Jane's recipe for mint chocolate cupcakes. This recipe is different to any others I have come across as it uses no milk; the liquid comes from melting dark chocolate in boiling water. Also, it includes ground almonds, something which adds texture but with a surprising light result. Decorating is done with dark chocolate ganache (instead of buttercream frosting); the consistency of ganache is markedly different to pipe. And, I'd also get to practise some of my chocolate piping skills.

These are definitely 'celebration' cupcakes, as the dark chocolate ganache is incredibly rich. I ended up using less on each cupcake, decorating only the very centre and adding piped chocolate shapes to give shape and height. This helped make the ganache mixture spread further. It is also a very large, wet mixture - I wasn't sure it would all make it into the cupcake liners!

Mint chocolate cupcakes

Ingredients

• 140g dark chocolate
• 330ml water
• 4 tablespoons cocoa
• 300g self-raising flour
• 2/3 cup ground almonds
• 180g butter, softened
• 400g brown sugar
• 4 eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspons peppermint essence
  
  
• Dark chocolate ganache
• 400g dark chocolate
• 375ml cream
  

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees Celsius. Line two 12-hole muffin trays with cupcake papers. (Makes 24)
2. Melt the chocolate and water together in a small saucepan or in a small jug in the microwave. Cool.
3. Sift the cocoa, flour and ground almonds together.
4. Beat the butter and sugar until light, then add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the peppermint essence.
5. Stir in the dry ingredients, then the cooled chocolate mix and blend until smooth.
6. Divide the mixture evenly between the cupcake papers and bake for 30 minutes.
7. Cool cupcakes in the muffin trays for 5 minutes before removing the cupcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.

Decoration
Make dark chocolate ganache by melting the chocolate and cream together in the microwave on low power. Stir to combine and set aside to cool before use. Stir in 1/2 teaspoon of peppermint essence and mix well. Pipe the ganache onto the cold cupcakes and decorate as desired.