Spooky scary Halloween dark chocolate cupcakes!

As promised, here are my Halloween cupcakes that I made this weekend! They seemed to go down *fairly* well at this months cake club and were very very chocolatey! I made bright orange, green and aubergine/black frosting. I was actually going for bright bright purple frosting but can never seem to quite achieve it!

I used the Halloween toppers that I’d bought from Sainsburys a few weeks ago (and the Halloween cases too!).

Once I ran out of toppers, I used dark chocolate sprinkles – I still think these look really cool though.

Here’s the recipe I used – it was adapted from this one – I sort of doubled it and then messed around with the quantities some more. If you’ve ever made Nigella’s brownies, making these will be a snap as the method is practically identical. I was going for 24 but this recipe made 30 cupcakes for me!

• 2 cups butter
• 250g dark chocolate
• 4 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• pinch salt
• 3 cups plain flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 100ml milk(I used semi-skimmed)

For the frosting

• 1kg icing sugar
• 160g butter
• 300ml milk (I used semi-skimmed)

First preheat your oven to your preferred cupcake baking temperature. For me that would be around 160/gas 5 or 6

Next, melt your chocolate and butter together. I did this in the microwave, just stir periodically as chocolate only burns in the microwave when its not stirred. I used this dark/plain chocolate from tesco which was very reasonably priced.

Once you’ve melted the chocolate and butter, add in your sugar and your eggs. Check the mix isn’t too hot before you add your eggs in as they could scramble if its very not (never happened to me though and I don’t exactly err on the side of caution). Mix them up!

YUM! Now add the dry ingredients and the vanilla extract. I added milk at the end to slacken the mixture as it was very thick and I wanted it to be more liquid and cupcake batter like. See how you go with it though and add milk as necessary. I also noticed that the mix firmed right up when it was sitting while I baked batches, so to slacken it again I just added a few more tablespoons of milk.

Fill your cupcake cases – as you can see, I am not the queen of doing this neatly! But when they’re cooked, everything seems to even out nicely by itself! I cooked mine for about 20-24 minutes per batch and turned them half way through. They’re ready when a clean knife, skewer or toothpick comes out clean (steamy, as opposed to covered in batter!).

I thought I’d show you my method for getting the cupcakes out of the pan as well – have your cooling tray ready and insert a knife (a palette knife would work well) under your cupcake and lever it out of the tin. Grab with your other hand and transfer to the cooling tray.

While my cupcakes were cooking and cooling, I got to work on frosting! I knew I would need A LOT of frosting, so I doubled the usual Hummingbird bakery frosting recipe that I like to use (recipe at the top of the page). I wasn’t sure whether I’d be successful with the bright green (I liked it!) or bright purple (came out almost black!) frosting so I kept most of it back to be orange. I used A LOT of sugarflair yellow and red colouring to achieve this colour – at least 3 tsps!

Green frosting ready to be swirled!

Me frosting the cakes

And here the cakes are set up at Cake club yesterday!

More of the amazing cakes on offer – plus a spooky pumpkin!

The three cakes I went for to begin with – chocolate cheesecake (very tasty, great base), chocolate marble cake (very chocolatey indeed, lovely!), and a chocolate fudge cupcake (not fudgy but very nice).

So. Much. Cake! How are you celebrating Halloween? We haven’t gotten any trick or treaters yet – I hope some turn up soon!