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Pepperminty Chocolate Cupcakes

Some time ago, my husband asked me to bake some chocolate cupcakes to his specifications. He wanted to have peppermint-flavoured chocolate cupcakes - more specifically, chocolate cupcakes topped with a white peppermint frosting. I finally got around to baking these yesterday, basing it on Nigella’s recipe for Aromatic Chocolate Cupcakes from her ‘How to be a Domestic Goddess‘ book. As my decision to bake these cupcakes was pretty impulsive, I didn’t get a chance to stock up on everything the recipe called for and I had to swap plain old brown sugar for the muscovado sugar. I also added some extra egg white that was leftover from another recipe. After mixing the batter, I filled the muffin cases half way and sprinkled some crumbled Peppermint Crisp chocolate in the middle before filling the rest of the case up with batter. Peppermint Crisps are bars of crispy mint shards covered in chocolate and I believe that they are uniquely Australian as I haven’t seen them anywhere else. 

After baking, I wanted to frost them with a peppermint icing, but alas, found that I was not in possession of any peppermint essence. I was SURE that I had bought some a couple of months ago in preparation for these cupcakes, but no…my memory deceived me. Instead, I iced them and sprinkeld more Peppermint Crisp over the top (not shown in picture).

I was hoping (fingers crossed) that the peppermint crisp in the middle of the batter would have stayed there to form a nice pepperminty centre to the cupcake, but when I cut one of them open to get a photo, I found that the chocolate had sunk to the bottom and did not make for a pretty picture :-( Nevertheless, these cupcakes were moreishly yummilicious. They had a crispy top (my favourite part) but the peppermint at the bottom also made this section interesting to eat. The icing was a little sweet for my liking so I’d like to try a different type of (peppermint) frosting next time. Any ideas on this would be much appreciated!

Aromatic Chocolate Cupcakes

110g unsalted butter, 200g dark muscovado or brown sugar, 1 large egg, beaten, 1/2 tsp vanilla extract, 50g dark chocolate, melted and cooled slightly, 100g pl flour, 1/2 tsp bicarb soda, 125ml boiling water

  1. Cream butter & sugar, then beat in egg and vanilla extract
  2. Fold melted chocolate and blend well but do not overbeat
  3. Add alternating spoonfuls of flour/bicarb soda and boiling water until you obtain a smooth & fairly liquid batter
  4. Fill muffin cases halfway and sprinkle chunks of Peppermint Crisp in centre. Spoon more batter over the chocolate to fill case & bake at 180C for 30min
  5. Ice and sprinkle more Peppermint Crisp over top

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 10:08 pm and is filed under cake, dessert. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Pepperminty Chocolate Cupcakes”

  1. Niki Says:
    October 19th, 2005 at 9:41 am

    I do love a Peppermint Crips bar; my mum used to crumble them up and add them to a sponge cake with whipped cream. Yummm.
    That’s the recipe for the dense chocolate loaf, in cupcake form, isn’ it? That’s the recipe I used for the cupcakes on my header; quite easily the most moist and decadent cupcakes I’ve made.
    What no essence?? You could’ve crushed up a few Fishermans’ Friends? ;-)

  2. cin Says:
    October 19th, 2005 at 10:04 am

    Ugh, can’t stand them! But I could’ve used some other peppermints that I had - DOH!

  3. plum Says:
    October 19th, 2005 at 1:21 pm

    I hate them too! But I must admit, when I saw the title, I assumed you were making those ones Niki did recently with crushed mints!

    These look yummy - I love chocolate and peppermint. Although, there aren’t many things I DON’T love with chocolate - chocolate and orange, chocolate and strawberry etc etc!

  4. tanvi Says:
    October 23rd, 2005 at 3:45 pm

    I adore mint and chocolate together- its a shame they dont sell peppermint crisps here in the US, they sound wonderful!

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