Continuing my cupcake of the month feature baed on a cupcake calendar that I was given for Christmas, this month we have a mint and chocolate recipe, which I’ve given the name ‘After Eight’ for obvious reasons. The recipe on the calendar didn’t involve chocolate, but I think that mint and chocolate go so well together, particularly dark chocolate, that I couldn’t resist adapting the recipe to include it. I also made the cake mixture itself much less sweet than the recipe in the calendar, because the icing is very sweet – it tastes like butter mints or Murray mints – and the bitterness of the dark chocolate goes well with this.
If you’d like to make these yourself, and I can assure you that they are yummy particularly after eight and the kids are in bed, here’s the recipe which makes 10.
Ingredients
- 50g sugar
- 160g self-raising flour
- 20g cocoa powder
- 150ml milk
- 1 egg
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 75g margarine
- 1 tsp mint extract
- 75g dark chocolate, cut into large chunks
- 50g margarine
- 100g icing sugar
- 1-2 tsp mint extract (depending how strongly minty you like it)
- green food colouring
- grated chocolate to decorate
Method
- Prepare a muffin tin by placing cupcake cases in the holes.
- Cream the margarine and sugar together until smooth and fluffy.
- Beat in the egg and milk.
- Add the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and mint extract and mix until well combined.
- Add the chocolate chunks and fold in until evenly distributed.
- Spoon the mixture into the cases to about 2/3 full.
- Bake at 180ºC for about 20-25 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
- Remove from the oven and leave to cool fully.
- Make the icing by beating together the icing sugar, margarine and mint extract, and adding the colouring a little at a time until it gets as green as you would like. Mine are quite Shrek-like, but you may want to go for a more subtle green shade 🙂
- Spoon the icing onto the top of each cupcake and spread it around (you could pipe it, but I find that using margarine makes it quite runny compared to buttercream icing).
- Finish them off by grating a small amount of dark chocolate onto each cake.