Christmas Cupcakes

While the majority of my Christmas holidays were taken up with present-buying, Articulate and essays, I found some time to make some cupcakes for Christmas Day.  I wanted to use flavours which taste essentially of Christmas, so I chose the Gingerbread flavoured ones I made for the course Christmas dinner and some original Chocolate Log cupcakes.

Gingerbread Cupcakes

I used the same recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days but for some reason the mixture did not smell quite as ‘Deck the Halls’ as before.  Fortunately, the Christmas muse managed to get me before I dyed the icing bright red; equally as fortunate, Tom’s mum gave me some Christmas-shaped sprinkles to decorate the cakes with, and my grandma gave me the toppers.  I have never used toppers on cupcakes; I think I am naturally drawn to decorations which are edible and preferably made almost entirely of sugar.  However, these looked sweet and were kind of a souvenir which allowed people to have a small reminder of their cake while eating it too.

Chocolate Log Cupcakes

While I doubt the wisdom of adding mint to chocolate and carrot to cake, I have a strong and unwavering belief that chocolate added to more chocolate can only lead to good things.  As such, chocolate logs rank very highly with me.  Originally I intended to make a full-sized and traditional chocolate log (the size of a full-sized standard cake, not a full-sized log) but it seemed somehow more inventive to try and reproduce that distinctive taste in a miniature form.  It was time to see if chocolate logs and cupcakes were a winning team.

For the actual cake I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days, as the vanilla cupcake recipe had worked so well in the mini birthday cakes.  While the cakes cooled off after baking, I mixed up the chocolate butter cream for the filling and the icing from the recipe in Love Food: The Cupcake.  I chose this particular book because the vanilla butter cream recipe produced beautiful, light icing and adding chocolate to this seemed like an exceptionally good idea.

Once the cakes were completely cool, I used a small, sharp knife to cut out a little well in the top of each cake.  Each hole had to be deep enough to contain a reasonable amount of filling, but not so deep that it went through the cake and made it split.  Once each had been filled, I replaced the part I had cut out and iced the cakes with a pallet knife.

I used the snowflake-shaped sprinkles to cover the cakes, as I thought the white looked nice on the brown.  I cut a chocolate Flake into sections about a centimetre long, dusted these with icing sugar and put them on the cake.  You may possibly be wondering why I did not dust the whole cake with icing sugar: I had already put the snowflakes on when the Christmas muse (here embodied by my mum) suggested this.  However, I still think they turned out rather nicely and tasted quite similar to the real thing, although next time I might try a solid chocolate topping.

The curse of the dessert struck again, and everyone was so full of potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, turkey and various other birds that no one could manage much dessert.  My granddad, dad and boyfriend managed a gingerbread one each, and my brother had a chocolate log.  Fortunately, Christmas is the best time of year to drag out celebrations, and over the next few days they were forced on various people in the spirit of good will.