With the addition of a new range in my life, I decided to make something special that I could bring into work with me (since I really don’t need all that sweetness available in my house).

Enter Chocolate cupcakes.

Again, Pinterest is my friend (and my enemy, and my friend).  Here’s where I got the recipe for the cupcake part: Chocolate Sweetheart Cupcakes

Now.  I don’t like coffee.  The smell is fine, in most cases, but I really, really don’t like the taste of it.  And when someone adds the taste of coffee to my chocolate, I get really upset.  So, I removed the water and espresso from the ingredients list.

Putting these together was pretty easy, really, and while the sour cream was a bit of a head tilt for me, the batter at least tasted good.

I wanted to make them a little Valentine’s Day-ish, so I went for a new to me frosting recipe, that was supposed to be strawberry in taste.  Unfortunately, I was unable to find the strawberry extract, so I just went with plain old vanilla.  It’s a lighter frosting than I typically go for, but my buttercream averse husband didn’t balk immediately when I made him taste it, so I called it a win.  Here’s the recipe for the frosting: Strawberry Dream Frosting  Please note – the website is weird, and sort of made my browser go haywire for a bit.  I would highly suggest getting the PDF copy downloaded.

I’m not a very good piper, or maybe I’m out of the habit.  I’m a little embarrassed to bring these in to the office, but hey, I’m an engineer, not a bakery artiste.  🙂

Conclusion:

I’m not sure if it was the removal of the espresso portion of the cupcake recipe, but they turned out a little drier than I would like for a cupcake.  The taste is still nice and chocolate-y, but I think that if I try these again, I’ll be adding unmelted chocolate chunks to it, just for fun.  And I’d love to see what would happen if I actually put strawberry frosting on top.