The Best Chocolate Cupcake Recipe

Check out my new blog with another amazing recipe for chocolate cupcakes!!

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Out of all the years of my life that I have been baking, I have not found one chocolate cupcake recipe that tasted good to me. They all tasted the same. Lacking in chocolate flavour, un-moist, and dense. Then I found this recipe. I was reluctant to try it, because I was afraid it would turn out like every other cupcake recipe I had found. But no! It was really good. Here it is.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temp
2  1/2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, room temp (you can put the eggs in a bowl of warm/hot water for a few minutes to warm them up if they are straight from the fridge. that’s what I do.)
1  1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (**Edit!!  natural cocoa powder works best here, but if all you have or can find is dutch processed, it might be okay. I find that callebaut cocoa powders works well in this recipe)
1 cup 2% or whole milk (whole milk works best)
2 teaspoons real vanilla

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Line a muffin tin with cupcake wrappers, or grease and flour really well or you won’t be able to get them out of the pan.

Beat the butter until it’s softened in a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. Add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy, that should take about 2 minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and beat until well combined. Measure out the flour, baking powder, soda, salt and cocoa powder and sift together.  Measure out the milk and vanilla in a liquid measuring cup and stir to combine. On low speed with your mixer, add about one third of the dry ingredients to the butter and sugar mixture and beat until only just mixed. Add about half of the milk/vanilla mixture and beat until just mixed barely mixed in. Keep doing this until your wet and dry ingredients are gone. It should go dry-wet-dry-wet-dry. This process should take no longer than 30 seconds (which is a long time when you’re actually counting). Finish by using a spatula to gently fold the batter to make sure everything  is well mixed and the bottom isn’t un-mixed. Scoop the batter into cupcake pans lined with cups about 2/3’s full. Bake the cupcakes for about 22-25 minutes, until the cake tester comes out clean. For cakes, fill the pans 2/3 full and bake for about 20 minutes at first, then keep checking every 5 minutes until it’s done.

Just for fun, I wanted to turn these cupcakes into german chocolate cupcakes. So what I did was coat the sides of the cupcakes with a ganache and rolled it in toasted coconut and finely chopped pecans. For the icing on top, I used a dulce de leche frosting, which I made by combining the dulce de leche with a bit of a good buttercream frosting. I piped that on top in a swirl and on top of that, I drizzled some of the extra ganache in a thin strand. Oh my god they were delicious! Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of these awesome cupcakes, only the chocolate cupcakes by themselves. Enjoy!

♥ Tara

p.s. please always remember that you will only have a result as good as the ingredients you used to make it. If you use flavourless cocoa, you will have flavourless cake/cupcakes. And don’t use reduced fat items, they contain a higher water content and obviously less fat and will throw off the balance of the ingredients and change the result.

Note: Since I’ve been getting requests on a video to show how to make these cupcakes, I am working on it! Hopefully it will be up soon.