Chock full of chocolate cupcakes: Day 19

Melanie Hunter

This was my second attempt at a recipe from the dessert section in the Chatelaine cookbook. I had high hopes it would be more successful than my Best-ever brownies blunder. But I already had a hand up: I was in the kitchen of an avid baker who not only had all the ingredients on hand but also had an eager 5-year-old wanting to do all the messy mixing for me. We were set.

It was nice having a sifter and an electric mixer on hand. I don't have a sifter at home (yet) and my mixer consists of a handheld version that I picked up at a grocery store thinking I needed to have one on hand in case of a baking emergency. I did, in fact, use it once to bake my first cake ever for a baby shower last fall. The mixer has since been sitting at the back of a cupboard ever since, keeping an dusty electric juicer company.

This recipe was really easy to follow. Particularly with my sister-in-law fetching ingredients for me from her cupboard and my 5-year-old niece adding ingredients to the mixing bowl. I basically just barked out orders. It was quite fun—perhaps I should become a baker!

I spooned the mixture into the cupcake pan (a.k.a muffin tin) and was happy to see that there were 17, rather than 12, cupcakes-to-be waiting to be baked into chocolatey goodness. I let my 5- and 3 year-old nieces lick the mixing attachments and the spatula clean. (I probably only gave them licking rights because, being pregnant, I shouldn't be eating raw batter.) My sister-in-law placed the cupcake trays into the oven and set the timer for 15 min so we could check to see if they were done.

To test them, she stuck a toothpick in (rather than a cake tester) to see if it would come out clean. It wasn't quite done yet, so we let them cook for another 5 minutes. Et voila! Beautiful looking and tasty-smelling, we had to convince the girls to let them cool down before eating them. My sister-in-law had some leftover homemade icing on hand (!) so I'll have to make the Vanilla buttercream icing from the cookbook another time. And I'm happy to say, the cupcakes were fabulous!