Thursday, February 14, 2013

♥Heart♥ shaped chocolate cupcakes with light frosting, chocolate shavings and mandarin zest

Hope you are all having a lovely day. My day was full of good mood, nice atmosphere and little pleasant things. It's been a regular working day, but with a special feeling of happiness, that makes you smile, like in a beautiful sunny day, even with grey weather outside. This chocolate heart muffins with light frosting and some chocolate shavings and mandarin zest on top were one of those pleasant things.
I've bought this form few months ago while shopping for the new year presents. Actually I've bought two of them - one went to my grandma and another is happily used by me. And I have to say I'm pretty satisfied with it.
I used this recipe with slight modifications to make the muffin dough. I added cocoa powder instead of melted chocolate, omitted adding 1 orange juice and putted my favorite spices in there. So the overall list of ingredients is:
  • 120 g flour
  • 150 g sugar
  • 10 g vanilla sugar (can be replaced by vanilla extract)
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • 40 g melted butter
  • 1 egg
  • 125 ml milk

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 170°C (325F).
2. Mix the flour, sugar, vanilla sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and cocoa powder together in a bowl.
3. Add the butter and mix until combined.
4. Whisk the egg and milk together in a jug.
5. Stir the egg and milk mixture into the flour mixture until just combined.
6. Spoon the mixture into the paper cups or other cupcake forms and bake for 10-15 minutes for small cupcakes and 15-20 minutes for larger ones, or until risen and golden-brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.
7. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for 10 minutes.
8. Decorate with frosting, chocolate shavings and fresh mandarin/orange zest.

I made chocolate shavings and mandarin zest using zest grater like on this picture.
And I used this recipe to make frosting. I have already written about this frosting in one of my previous post saying that it is really good - very light and smooth.
Adding some banana hearts for decoration. Bananas taste absolutely great with this frosting. Probably I'll try to make such banana cream once. What can be better than a combination of chocolate, bananas and whipped or alike cream.
Looks nice, doesn't it?
I've made some bite muffins in paper cups using the dough leftovers.
So my Valentine's day was sweet and pleasant. How about yours?

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