Gracie’s Life Experiment

It’s the Good Shepherd Church Summer Fete on Saturday and we said we’d make a few cakes for the cake stall.  Decided to make some smaller cupcake/muffin type things (as these tend to raise a bit more than selling off whole cakes).  So I had a browse on the internet and found a recipe for Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes on the Nigella site.  

For posterity, here’s the excerpt from the site:

Ingredients for cupcake: 125g of unsalted butter; 100g dark chocolate; 300g of morello cherry jam; 150g caster sugar; pinch of salt; 2 large eggs, beaten; 150g self-raising flour; muffin cases & tin
Ingredients for icing; 100g dark chocolate; 100ml double cream; glace cherries for decoration

How to Make:
-Preheat the oven to 180?C/gas mark 4.
-Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan on the heat to melt. When nearly completely melted, stir in the chocolate. Leave for a moment to begin softening, then take the pan off the heat and stir with a wooden spoon until the butter and chocolate are smooth and melted. Now add the cherry jam, sugar, salt and eggs. Stir with a wooden spoon and when all is pretty well amalgamated stir in the flour.
-Scrape and pour into the muffin papers in their tin and bake for 25 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out.
-When the cupcakes are cool, break the chocolate for the icing into little pieces and add them to the cream in a saucepan. Bring to the boil, remove from the heat and then whisk – by hand or electrically – till thick and smooth. Ice the cupcakes, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon, and stand a cherry in the centre of each.  Makes 12.

Made a few changes to the recipe as we couldn’t find a relatively cheap cherry jam and ended up with Tesco Bramble Jelly instead (used a bit less of it as it’s quite sugary already) and we used their economy/value plain chocolate.  Also we had some cupcake cases (not muffin cases which are bigger).  We managed to make about double the number of cupcakes (fairy cake sized).  Tonight we just made the cupcakes, but haven’t made the icing yet as they’re still cooling.  Of course we had to sample a few, and they were gorgeous.  Nice and crunchy/crispy on top, soft and moist inside and the little pockets of molten jelly were to die for.  Tasted a bit like blackforest cupcakes.  Thank you Nigella – another great recipe.

Summary of the day:  Woke up at 2.30am and went to the loo, Tossed and turned all night visiting toilet for more wee breaks every hour on the 1/2 hr!!  Washed up in kitchen, Made hubby packed lunch, Went back to bed at 6am, Zonked out till 10am!  Spent rest of the day wandering round in a bit of a daze, Made Chicken Thai Green Curry for dinner, Went to Tescos to get cake ingredients, Made cupcakes!