Devilishly good?

It's Halloween tomorrow and a few days ago I saw a fab photo of some yummy looking cupcakes. These were last year's (orange sponge, black frosting) so decided to do something similar this year. 

The recipe which went with the photo I saw of the cupcakes I wanted to make, was a devil's food cake recipe. But it used cups. I don't like using cups so settled on god old faithful Ms Lawson's Devil's food cake recipe. The recipe is for a cake (8"/20cm) but I figured it'd fit into 12 muffin cases. And it did! I use muffin cases rather than cupcake cases

Devil's food cupcake batter:

50g cocoa powder

100g dark brown muscovado sugar

250 ml boiling water

125g soft unsalted butter

150g caster sugar

225g plain flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 170c fan.

Put the cocoa and dark muscovado sugar into a bowl and pour in the boiling water. Whisk to mix, then set aside. 

Cream the butter and caster sugar together, beating well until pale and fluffy.

Measure the flour, baking powder and bicarb together in another bowl, and set aside for a moment. Add 1 egg to the creamed butter and sugar, followed by a scoopful of flour mixture, then the second egg. Keep mixing and incorporate the rest of the dried ingredients for the cake, then finally mix and fold in the cocoa mixture, scraping it's bowl well with a spatula.

It's a runny batter so I used a ladle to fill the muffin cases until 3/4 full. 

Bake for 18 minutes until they're nicely risen and a cake tester comes out clean. Leave to cool.

(Excuse the yellow patches in mine, I didn't mix the batter well enough)

I've been struggling with buttercream frosting being too sweet recently (for my very opinionated family cake testers) so decided I'd have a go at a cream cheese frosting for these bad boys and hope that it would take colouring without turning funny. I have a red sugarflair gel but I wanted to use extra red as most times I use the normal red it'll turn what I'm colouring pink.

Frosting:

4 tbsp butter (softened)

200g cream cheese

400g icing sugar

Mix the icing sugar and butter for 2-3 minutes until combined and creamy. Add the icing sugar in 2 or 3 goes (attempting to avoid an icing cloud of doom which covers the kitchen in fairy dust). Pop into the fridge until you're ready to use.

It's preferable to make the devil's horns the day before to give them time to go hard. Colour fondant black (I used extra black) and break off little balls, roll in your hand to a taper on one end and turn upwards to make a horn shape.

Frost the cupcakes when cold and add your horns!

I think someone enjoyed them!