Chocolate Orange Cupcakes

Dark chocolate cupcakes with orange filling. In this first tentative attempt to make cupcakes I choose to take a chance on a mix of flavors that I love - chocolate and orange. I simply want to do a little bit of a fun filling cupcakes with a creamy orange filling and top with classic buttercream. The recipe gives quite a lot (very much) of buttercream and in my opinion you could cut it in half, but leaves the m & aruml; tten according to what I researched from American recipes.

Cupcakes are a sweeter variant of muffins often topped with icing and are meant to serve one person. It is also common for them to have a filling such as berries or different types of cream. The first known description of a pastry reminiscent of a cupcake is from 1796 when a recipe for "a light cake to bake in small cups" was written by Amelia Simmons in "American Cookery". The term "cupcake" first appeared in a cookbook from 1828 written by Eliza Leslie.

Common ingredients are butter, sugar, flour and eggs. Because they are smaller than many other pastries, they are baked faster and often do not need more than 20-25 minutes in the oven. The richness of invention in terms of flavoring and decorating cupcakes is very great. Many people choose to make really advanced toppings and decorations of buttercream and sugar paste, but also combinations that you do not normally think of such as. hearty cupcakes with salmon are available. Some favorites I found and plan to try in the future when I searched around on the internet were princess cake, gingerbread with caramel sauce, kladdkaka and Swedish sandwich cake. Above all, I think the variant that contains all the flavors from a princess cake but avoids all the tricky elements such as. assembling a whole cake is ingenious and it is something I will do as soon as I have time.

Some things I learned by trying around with slightly different recipes are the following:

• Ordinary all purpose flour is best. I tried some other variants but did not get better results from any of them.
• Try to get all the ingredients for the dough to room temperature before mixing. This mainly applies to eggs and milk.
• Do not fill the muffin tins to more than a maximum of two thirds (2/3) to get the perfect shape on the baked cupcakes. If they are overfilled, they look good directly from the oven, but they will collapse slightly when they cool and then they get the shape of a tired mushroom instead.
• When you take them out of the oven, just let them rest in the muffin tin for a short while. The muffin tin keeps the heat for a while and will continue to cook your cupcakes and there is a risk that they will then be overcooked.
• Ordinary American buttercream with vanilla is very sweet and the amount suggested on many American recipes is also significantly more than I want. I only used half of the buttercream and even then it was very sweet. I think us Swedes would rather use a less sweet buttercream or another type of frosting.
• Cupcakes are excellent for freezing. I used containers with lids that could just hold about 4 cupcakes and they were excellent even several weeks later. They only needed a few hours in the fridge before they were ready to eat, but if you want to be sure you can of course leave them in the fridge overnight.

I think this recipe turned out well and I like these cupcakes but you could exclude the filling completely and e.g. grated orange peel directly into the chocolate batter instead. I also thought that the buttercream became too sweet for my taste and will replace it with another type of frosting such as. cream cheese-frosting or similar less sweet varieties in the future.