Chocolate Cupcake Experiment
So any baker will tell you that finding the perfect chocolate cake recipe is a huge goal! Some have found it, some have made their own, and some are still searching (like me). You hear so many different things about using different ingredients and techniques, but ultimately it’s all down to personal taste. I prefer butter to oil and I’ve only ever used just caster sugar in my recipes, so I thought it was definitely worth testing a few new ideas and recipes.
I’ve wanted to do this ‘experiment’ for a long time now, to find a solid recipe that I could use for everyday chocolate cupcakes for the future. This was more for an indulgent chocolate cake; what I used to use, was a standard sponge recipe and just exchange 1oz of flour for cocoa. This leads to a very light and malty chocolate cupcake, rather than a super chocolatey, rich cake.
I did a blind taste test on both my mum and my sister and it was interesting that the results came out fairly similarly. And this is what we all agreed on…
My control recipe for this, was a very old Mary Berry Devil’s Food Cake recipe that relies on creaming butter and sugar, and alternating a flour mix with a cocoa and water mix into the batter. I’d like to take this opportunity to sound very hipster and say that Mary Berry was my idol years before the Bake Off ever hit our screens! But anyway, this recipe is a runny batter, a rich dark, quite close crumb cake.
This is soft, light and spongy – most likely due to the use of butter and the creaming method.
Nice close crumbs make it moist and bouncy
Deep and chocolately from a cocoa/water mix
This came out 3rd place in the rankings!
I had never really used buttermilk in my recipes but was assured that it would make my cakes super moist and give them an extra little bounce. So my first adapted recipe halved the liquid used and replaced the other half with buttermilk. I also decided to half the caster sugar and replace this with dark brown sugar, which I hoped would make it even richer, denser and give it that little Jamaica Ginger cake taste!
This was smooth, very soft and incredibly moist, just like everyone said buttermilk would make it and partly due to still using butter
Everyone said, all round they enjoyed the texture being close and dense, but not ‘sticky to your teeth’. This was probably added to by the brown sugar
This was also voted the most chocolatey, perhaps because of the two sugar types bringing out the taste and the use of a small amount of coffee
This came out on top of the rankings and I will be providing the recipe later!
**TIP** Don’t worry if you don’t have buttermilk, I never do so I went in search of an alternative! I found through various helpful people on the internet that adding 1tbsp of white wine vinegar or lemon juice and letting it sit will slightly curdle the milk...voila! Buttermilk made!
The next recipe I wanted to try, was one that substituted butter for oil, something that I had only ever done for a ‘Black Bottomed’ cupcake recipe in my Hummingbird Bakery book. I was told that again, this would add to the moistness of the cake, but to be honest, I’m a stickler for butter!
This was considered the driest of the cakes! I know! After being assured that oil was great for moisture I was disappointed to find that this was not the case
This had a much bigger crumb structure which is personally not to my taste but I know lots of people are a fan!
It was spongy and had a nice aftertaste but wasn’t as chocolatey and unfortunately came last out of the 4
And lastly, I wanted to try a combo of both, oil AND butter! I retained the brown sugar and buttermilk and figured that the butter would give me that creamy, soft and spongey taste and the oil would add to the moistness further. This was adapted from a recipe found in one of my Good Food magazines for a layer cake.
Well, this just sort of melted in your mouth and was really moist with a fine crumb
The cake was crumbly but not dry in any way which was one of the key things I noticed about the combo of butter and oil
It was densely chocolatey but definitely not one you could eat too much of as it was perhaps the richest
This came out as the runner up for the top spot!
So, the recipe that proved most popular with everyone…
Yields 12 cupcakes
Ingredients
– 50g cocoa
– 100ml warm water with a tsp on instant coffee
– 100ml buttermilk
– 100g butter
– 235g caster sugar
– 235g dark brown sugar
– 2 eggs
– 185g plain flour
-1/4 tsp baking powder
– 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
Method
– Firstly cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy (classic)
– Whisk together your water and cocoa and set your wet ingredients aside while you sieve together all of your dry ingredients into a bowl
– Add one egg at a time to the butter mix, along with a tablespoon of the flour mix, until it is all combined.
– Alternate adding your wet and dry ingredients into the butter mix along with a pinch of salt. Mix until the flour is just combined so as to not overwork the flour
– Fill your cupcake case 2/3 full and bake in a preheated oven at 180C for 18-20 mins until a skewer comes out clean
– Leave your cakes to cool and decorate with your favourite frosting, sprinkles or just eat them as they are! Or as I have very much unnecessarily done, top them with ganache and macarons!
LB Love x
