Verdict: Chocolate cupcakes

Not the prettiest cupcakes in the world, I'll grant you - but absolutely gorgeous! I baked an extra cupcake to try, and I admit I scarfed it down before it had a chance to cool down. While still hot from the oven, it was soft, moist, chocolatey, sweet - everything that you'd want from a cupcake. I'm certain that they'll still be great once they've cooled, but I didn't manage to test that! This one worked really well!

Cupcakes!

After a decade at Balliol, I'm about to leave for the real world, so I've been busy saying goodbye and thank you to the people who have helped me over the years. The porters are the final group that I'd like to thank, and a batch of cupcakes seem like a good way to express that! The recipe that I'm using is this one, with only the tiniest bit of faffing around the edges.

Chocolate Cupcakes
Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 150g Soft dark brown sugar
• 3 Eggs
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 115g Plain flour
• 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1tsp Cream of tartar
• 35g Cocoa powder
• 100g Chocolate chips

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar together.
2. Beat in the eggs and vanilla.
3. Fold in the remaining ingredients.
4. Pour into cupcake cases and bake at 170C for 20-25 mins.
5. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

I found I had to let the mixture down a little with a splash of milk. Here's how they turned out straight from the oven - I'm certainly not good at cupcakes!

Coloured cupcake cases are pretty though!

Yeah... turning them out of their cases could have gone a bit better.

The finished article!

Verdict: Mystery coffee cake

The mystery cake was actually quite good! Really rich, as expected, and very dense, but in quite a good way. It reminded me quite a bit of the chocolate ganache cake I baked a few years ago - and having made that connection, I notice that the recipes are actually rather similar! In any case though, it was rich, dark, chocolately and wonderfully dense. A good cake, but not a light one!

Mystery cake!

That was a bit of a long, unplanned hiatus - life got a bit busy again! Anyway, we're back for the moment at least. My friend Tracy invited Trisha and me over tonight, mainly so I can bug her husband, Ben, to explain MRI to me - and if that's not worth bringing a cake for, I don't know what is.

I've had a post-it note stuck to the front page of my Filofax for the last age. It's got a quick summary of a recipe for a coffee cake written on it, in my handwriting, written with one of my fountain pens and in the ink I used to run in that pen. The weird thing is though, I've got absolutely no recollection of writing it! I assume that at some point I saw this recipe and thought it looked good or interesting (and in fairness, I do still think it looks both good and interesting) and copied down crib notes intending to bake it at some point. Unfortunately, because of this, I have no idea where the recipe came from, so I can't credit the original author properly - sorry! Nevertheless, it's time to bake that mystery cake!

Mystery Coffee Cake
Ingredients

• 100g Plain flour
• 200g Caster sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp Cream of tartar
• 100g Cocoa powder

• 2 Eggs
• 1tbsp Vanilla extract (yup, that's a lot of vanilla!)
• 60g Olive oil (That was my guess as to how much 75ml weighed - it's a bit low though; more like 65ml)
• 150ml Milk
• 150ml Black coffee

Method

1. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl together.
2. Whisk the wet ingredients together with a balloon whisk.
3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and whisk together.
4. Pour into a lined cake tin and bake at ~180C for 45-60 mins.

Here are the mixtures halfway through step 2. I whisked the eggs and oil together separately first to ensure that they'd distribute well through the other wet ingredients - but with hindsight, I don't think it was necessary!

 The mixture ready for baking. It's wonderfully glossy!

The finished article, fresh from the oven. It smells wonderful and looks ever so dark and fantastically rich - I think I might let it cool and cover it with a ganache just for that extra level of decadence!

What the heck, why not? I did cover it with ganache in the end - 200g of 53% cocoa dark chocolate and 150ml of double cream. That's a lot of ganache...