These are my chocolate cupcakes. The ugliest cakes in the world, don't you agree?
The recipe seemed simple enough:
100g plain flour
20 cocoa powder
140g caster sugar
1tsp baking powder
40g marg
120ml milk whisked together with 1 egg
Beat together flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder and butter. Add milk & egg mixture in two parts. Make sure it's not lumpy. Pour into cake papers, bake at 170C until risen and bouncy, with nothing left on the cake tester stick when inserted.
Sounds easy, huh? Well, the mixture didn't go as far as it was meant to, and for some reason, rather than making fewer, I just assumed it would perhaps expand a lot and made the 12 I was expecting. Uh-oh... I should trust my instincts. Some didn't rise enough, and they were just too small for the size of the paper cases.
The paper cases! Now we come to one of the main issues. I think they've grown! They seem FAR too big for my muffin tin all of a sudden. So the cakes ended up a right dodgy shape and not cake-like at all. Ridiculous.
Looking at it again, I can see a very ugly man's face surrounded by a Victorian lace collar....
For the frosting, I mixed together butter and icing sugar, as normal... Then I melted some dark chocolate and mixed that in, rather than my normal procedure of just some cocoa powder. That didn't seem too happy either, and so the cakes got a bit uglier....
Hurrumph. If not the ugliest cakes in the world, they're definitely the ugliest ones I've ever made! However, they do taste quite nice. And, it was the inaugural bake of my new Kitchenaid mixer - which was A-Maz-Ing. Apart from being an element in the ugliest cake competition, it was brilliant. I love it.
