When Chocolate Bars Become Cupcakes
It’s been awhile since I made some well planned, decadent cupcakes. Yes, I made Jaffa cupcakes last weekend – and they were lovely – but they were unplanned and super quick to make; both great things, but they left me wanting to come up with something a little more exciting.
So I spent a bit of time mulling over my options. My first thought was that I could bake a basic, tasty cupcake (minimising time in a hot kitchen), then ice it with some elaborate decorations – buttercream flowers or something. Then I remembered how painful it is to pipe intricate things with buttercream in summer (everything gets warm and gooey, so the icing needs to go into the fridge every few minutes).
My next thought was to make an unusual flavoured cupcake, then decorate it in the ‘usual’ fashion to disguise its unique flavour. Then I remembered that would require a lot of time in a kitchen with a heated oven, so crossed that off the list.
Then I realised I could make some cupcakes that were the best of both ideas – beautiful, moist (but plain) cupcakes, iced with a 1M tip as usual but with a unique and decadent buttercream icing. Now just to work out what flavour they would be. I was pondering this as I strolled down to the dairy one afternoon to get an afternoon pick-me-up, coming up with a few average ideas but nothing that really jumped out. I arrived at the dairy, grabbed a Coke Zero and a Crunchie and headed back to work.
That’s when it hit me – I could make Crunchie cupcakes! Suddenly it all came together and I had the whole cupcake planned before I even made it back to the office. Rather than stuffing a chunk of Crunchie bar inside a cupcake or something similar, I decided to try my hand at deconstructing the chocolate bar and putting it together in a cupcake-y way.
So on Saturday afternoon (yes, in the hottest part of the day) I got to work. First I baked a batch of my favourite chocolate cupcakes – they’re moist, rich and chocolatey but light enough so as not to overwhelm the icing (which in this case, is where the magic happened). With the cupcakes baked and cooling on the bench I made a batch of milk chocolate ganache, roughly icing the top of each cooled cupcake with the creamy milk chocolate mixture.
Here comes the best part – the icing. With six full-sized crunchie bars on hand, I went about peeling (with a veggie peeler) and slicing (with a sharp knife) the chocolate coating away from the hokey pokey centre of each bar. Slicing was definitely much faster, but peeling left me with beautiful spirals and flakes of chocolate, so I made sure to peel two bars and hold on to the peels.
Then I placed the six naked Crunchie bars into a food processor and ground them up until they looked like a yellow flour. I whipped up a batch of buttercream icing, added the Crunchie powder and mixed it all together to make one of the most delicious icings I have ever tasted. A quick swirl of icing onto each ganache-topped cupcake, a sprinkle of chocolate peelings and (for a few extra-special cupcakes) a chunk of Crunchie placed on top and these deconstructed Crunchie cupcakes became a reality.
They truly are delicious and well worth all the effort that goes into making them – the icing tastes exactly like a creamy Crunchie bar (can you even imagine such a thing?), while the light chocolate ganache gives them just the right amount of milk chocolate flavour. Click here for the full recipe.
Who’d have thought Crunchies could get any better, right?
Kirsten
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