I made that!

My friends Carmen and Alex are getting married this weekend (congrats!) and they’ve asked me to make the cupcakes! Today I’m testing options for the groom’s cake, and he requested a chocolate and mint combination. I’m super excited, since I’ve never experimented with mint before. I also wanted to test out a different chocolate cake recipe than the one I normally use. Tonight is my weekly dinner and trashy TV (90210 is away for the moment, so we distract ourselves with True Blood), so I have a captive audience to taste my experiments.

So here goes…

I started by melting some chocolate.

Once the chocolate was melted, I added butter and stirred it around until it melted into the mixture.

Once it was all smooth I mixed in sugar.

Then I whipped it for a few minutes.

And then slowly whipped in some eggs.

I folded in flour, salt and baking powder and then piped the batter into cupcake liners.

They baked for about 24 minutes and came out looking like brownies… yummmm.

While they cooled I made a swiss meringue buttercream that I flavored with peppermint oil.

And then I started having second thoughts, because sometimes mint can just taste like medicine. So I whipped melted chocolate into half of the buttercream. At tonight’s tasting I’ll get the final say on which is yummier!

Time to assemble those little suckers. I used a fluted tip to poke a hole into the middle of the cupcakes.

And filled the holes with a chocolate mint ganache!

And then topped half with mint buttercream, and half with the chocolate buttercream. So tonight it’s a taste-off! Chocolate Mint vs. Chocolate Chocolate Mint!

Stay tuned for a winner…