Chocolate Cupcakes with Butter Glaze

How to make the batter

1. Dark brown chocolate cupcakes with a shiny glaze are a real treat. With morning coffee they are insanely good! They come out very airy, with a pleasant sweet chocolate flavor, and they neither squash nor crumble.

2. Turn on the oven and heat it to 180 °C, and get all the ingredients ready.

   

3. Mix all the dry ingredients. Sift half a cup of flour (65 g) into a bowl, then add a pinch of fine salt, half of the powdered sugar (9 g), i.e. 1 tbsp (you’ll need the other half for whisking the eggs), and 2 heaped tbsp of cocoa (20 g) powder. Next comes the baking powder: store-bought is fine, a quarter of a teaspoon or even slightly less is enough. It will lift the bake nicely, so don’t overdo it.

   

4. Melt the butter with the chocolate. Put 80 g of softened butter in a ceramic bowl and grate 40 g of dark chocolate over it.

   

   You can heat the mixture in a saucepan over low heat, but then it’s very hard to control the heat and temperature. It’s very convenient to do it in the microwave: start with 10 secs, then stir. Adding 5 secs at a time, heat until the butter and chocolate have melted completely and the mixture is perfectly smooth. It won’t even have time to get hot, whereas heating in a saucepan, you would have to cool it down. In the end the mixture should be just slightly warm.

   

5. Whisk the eggs with the powdered sugar and combine with the chocolate mixture. You can whisk with a mixer or a hand whisk, it doesn’t matter. Crack one egg into a large bowl and add the yolk of the second. Add 1 tbsp of powdered sugar (9 g) or, if you prefer, regular white sugar. You also need a flavoring: vanilla or something else “to taste”. For example, I add rum flavoring. Whisk the eggs and sugar until well combined and starting to lighten.

   

   Continuing to whisk slowly, add the slightly warm mixture of melted butter and chocolate. If the butter is hot, the eggs can curdle, so make sure it has cooled. Also, don’t whisk the eggs and butter vigorously: simply stirring them is enough to get a mass of even color.

   

6. Add the prepared dry mixture to the bowl and gently fold everything with a spatula until you get a completely uniform dark brown mass. The batter is quite thick and flows slowly. If it turns out too stiff, you can add 1-2 tbsp of milk or cream and stir until smooth. For the chocolate cupcakes to be fluffy and not dense, the batter should resemble very thick honey.

   

7. Add 1 tbsp of chocolate drops to the batter and stir with a spatula. They are usually sold in bags of 50-80 g; it’s simply dark chocolate in the form of small granules. Keep a few for decorating the finished bake. Then transfer the batter to a small plastic bag.

   

How to bake

1. Divide the batter among the molds: snip off a corner of the bag and pipe the batter, filling each mold two thirds full. You can use disposable paper muffin cups or, like me, buy silicone molds of a suitable size. The batter contains a lot of fat, so there’s no need to grease the molds.

   

3. Put all the filled molds on a baking sheet and place it in an oven preheated to 180 °C. The baking time for the cupcakes is 25-30 mins. The batter rises actively thanks to the baking powder: during baking it almost doubles in volume, and the chocolate cupcakes come out with a tall, domed top.

   

   Use a toothpick to check that the batter is baked through: it should come out dry. By the way, the toothpick may pierce a chocolate drop and leave a mark on it. Test the cupcakes in several places.

4. Take the bake out of the oven and let it cool. Then carefully remove the cupcakes from the molds.

How to make the glaze

1. When the cupcakes have cooled well, to room temperature, prepare the mixture for the chocolate glaze. Put all the components, 40 g of dark chocolate, 15 g of white chocolate, 1 tsp of butter and 1 tbsp of milk or cream, in a ceramic bowl and heat in the microwave until melted, in short bursts and stirring, just like the butter and chocolate for the batter. The glaze should be liquid and slightly warm.

   

2. Spread the liquid glaze over the tops of the cupcakes with a silicone brush, or by dipping. By the way, the glaze hides cracks on the tops from baking nicely, and they will most likely appear. While the chocolate is still a little liquid, sprinkle the tops of the cupcakes with a few chocolate drops and grated white chocolate.

   

3. Let the glaze set: after a while it will become firm but not hard, and it shouldn’t crumble. For better setting, you can put the chocolate cupcakes in the cold for 10-15 mins, but don’t chill them for long.

Serving

1. Serve the cupcakes with morning coffee or cappuccino and you’ll be happy. The bake is soft, doesn’t crumble and holds its shape perfectly when you bite into it. The flavor is, as they say, very “chocolatey”.

   

   The cupcakes keep for several days: put them on a plate and cover with a paper napkin, or place them in a cardboard box. Remember that the batter has a lot of fat, butter and cocoa butter, and a lot of carbohydrates. So the cupcakes are quite high in calories.