Z as in Zebra

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

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Over the course of the past few months, I have acquired several kinds of chips:

But today’s recipe calls for just these two: Special Dark and Mini

And a dozen or so of these babies. Mmm. Fluffy, sugary goodness.

A HUGE Thank You to my mother-in-love for loaning me her food scale. Without it, I’d totally be guessing how many chocolate chips are in 8 ounces…

Like most healthy yummy recipes, you start with your dark chocolate chips and two sticks of butter (I know, I know. You health nuts can go ahead and cringe now.)

You melt that down until the chocolate is completely incorporated…but you don’t want to COOK it, so don’t get it too hot, just hot enough to melt.

So you have the likes of this: chocolate soup!

Next, you cream the eggs and sugar together.

This makes quite a frothy combo.

Next come the dry ingredients.

And the chocolate soup.

The final mixture looks like this:

Get your muffin pan lined and ready. Being frugal and not one to care if the papers match or not, I used up some odds and ends by mixing together several kinds of papers.

Fill the cups with the batter…

remember these guys? The Minis? Now’s their chance to shine!

A teaspoon or so of the Minis are sprinkled on each cupcake.

The cakes are then baked in the oven. The recipe said they would be “very moist”, but when I took them out of the oven, they seemed RAW in the middle…like a molten lava cake. Throwing caution to the wind and straying from my recipe, I cooked them for another 10 minutes to see if they’d set up in the center.

Once they were cooked sufficiently, I topped each one with a fluffy jumbo marshmallow and stuck them under the broiler (oh, and burnt my arm in the process. Such fun!).

Clearly, my broiler doesn’t heat very evenly. Or maybe it’s the fact that I’d never used the broiler in a gas oven before and didn’t really know what I was doing. At any rate, they turned out to be very DELICIOUS!!!

Chocolatey, marshmallowy, warm, and ooey-gooey. Mmm mmm mmm.

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

One of my favorite smells of Autumn is that of Apple Cider. Mmm. I can smell it now. That said, I was very excited to try the Thanksgiving Apple Cider Cupcakes.

You start with your dry ingredients, chopped dried apples (straight from my grandparents’ farm in Nebraska!) and warm apple cider.

The dry ingredients (including cinnamon) combined with the apple cider make THE most aromatic batter ever.

Next, I added the dried apple bits:

And the baked beauties looked a little something like this:

Look at that yummy texture!

Next, I cooked up some chopped apples with some butter and sugar to make the filling.

Once the cupcakes are cool, you hollow out the centers ever-so-slightly and fill the cavity with the baked apples.

Mmm Mmm Mmm. Who needs icing?!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

In the “After Dinner Cupcakes” chapter, every recipe calls for some sort of alcohol. You can tell by the name that these called for rum. In fact, the first step was to soak raisins in rum for 30 minutes.

Then the rum was boiled with some butter and sugar to make a syrupy mixture.

The syrup was added to the dry ingredients along with the soaked raisins.

Ready to go in the oven!

Baked:

Mmm. Wish you could smell these! Look at that sweet, sticky cupcake dome!

Rum was also used in the icing. Then, each cupcake was topped with a raisin.

I’m ready for my close-up.

Look at that sweet, slightly crusted icing and that moist cakey goodness! Whew!

*CHOMP!* Delish!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

If you like chocolate and mint together, you would LOVE these cupcakes! Layer upon layer of chocolate, then mint, then chocolate, then mint. Mmm.

I was so excited to have a chance to use the cupcake papers my friends Emily and Jacee had gotten me for my birthday–pretty much the greatest gift for a baker and paper-lover like me! For these cupcakes I chose the obvious choice–brown!

As with pretty much every other recipe, I started by creaming butter and sugar…soon to be followed by eggs (shown hiding in the background).

While the butter and sugar are combining, I measured out the dry ingredients, including cocoa powder, as well as a half-cup of Andes mint chips.

Dry ingredients were added to the batter mixture.

As well as some half-and-half.

Then, the mint chips were sprinkled on top of the batter and pressed in slightly.

Would you LOOK AT THAT?! Mmm.

Once the cupcakes came out of the oven, they looked like pure perfection…but we’re not finished yet!

((look at those mint chunks! Yummy!))

Butter and powdered sugar form the base for the icing…

And a little green coloring and some drops of peppermint extract make everything a bit mintier.

What a beauty! But we’re still not done! (remember what I said about layers and layers?!)

Next, I melted some dark chocolate to make a ganache.

And each cupcake was dipped in the chocolate and then topped with a Junior Mint!

Woo hoo! Chocolate, mint, chocolate, mint, chocolate, mint!

Hallelujah!

In September, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven’t read about it yet, you can do so here.

***

In the Kids’ Cupcakes section of the book, there is a recipe for Cookies & Cream Cupcakes. Um, YUM!

You start by adding a bunch of crushed-up Oreo cookies to the vanilla batter.

Mix it all up…

And bake until they look like this:

LOOK at those yummy chunks of cookie. Fresh out of the oven, these cupcakes smelled a lot like cookies and cream ice cream, so I knew I was on the right track!

Then, you mix up a bunch of softened butter and cream cheese…

…and melt some white chocolate.

Cream the two together to make the most amazing white-chocolate icing to spread on your cupcakes. (It’s reminiscent of the cream filling in an Oreo).

Grab a heapin’ helping of mini Oreos.

Frost your cupcakes with the white chocolate icing and add a couple minis to decorate.

MMM.

Then, unwrap that sucker as fast as you can and dig in!!!