Chocolate Holiday Cupcakes: Two Ways

December was a busy baking month for me, making desserts for parties and goodies to give as Christmas presents. For two parties, I made my usual cupcakes, but attempted to make them a bit more seasonal. I usually use the classic Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, a great little book with lots of fancy ideas. I mostly just use the basic vanilla and cupcake recipes, though, not usually vegan either, and spruce them up a little.

The basic chocolate recipe is quite easy. It involves souring 1 cup milk by adding a tsp of vinegar and letting it sit for a few minutes, then mixing in the other wet ingredients (1/3 c oil, 1 tsp vanilla) and the sugar (which I usually reduce to 1/2 cup from 3/4 cup). Whisk the dry ingredients (1 cup flour, 1/3 cup cocoa, 3/4 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/4 tsp salt) and then mix them all together in a delicious chocolatey batter. And since there are no eggs - you can definitely lick the spoon. Bake for around 20 minutes @350 and voila!

For the first party of the season, a Chanukah party, I was inspired by a tea from Tealish (a great Toronto tea store), whose seasonal 'Dreidels and Donuts' tea involved flavours of chocolate and jelly donut. So I decided to put cherry jam in the middle of each cupcake. I also added some almond extract to the batter with the vanilla. Instead of an icing, I made a glaze, like a donut would have, from icing sugar and milk.

While they looked quite nice, there was a fatal flaw in this plan. Unlike muffins, whose thicker batter can support jam in the middle, cupcake batter is very thin, and the jam just made its way down to the bottom of the liner was it baked. While they still tasted good, they were hard to eat since the bottom of each one was full of gooey jam! Ideally you could flip it upside down onto a plate, but oh well. Lesson learned.

For a Christmas party, I decided to make candy cane cupcakes. I added 1 tsp mint extract to the batter. I topped them with a simple butter-icing sugar icing, and then topped the icing with crushed candy canes. While the Dollarama candy canes were quite disappointing (why were they soft, and not hard, and sorta grey in the middle?) I think the cupcakes turned out well. Can't go wrong with chocolate and mint!