Mint Chocolate Cupcakes

A day off from work means a day of baking and eating. Today I visited my lovely Jasmin and we made delicious mint chocolate cupcakes and banoffee pie. I’ll begin with the cupcakes.

It uses basic sponge quantities – however many eggs you use, you use double the amount of flour, sugar and butter in ounces. So today I used 4oz of butter (125g), 4oz of sugar, 2 eggs and we would have used 4oz of flour, but we substituted some for cocoa powder.

• We creamed the butter and then added the sugar.
• Then we added the two eggs.
• Then, to make it minty, we added peppermint extracts (it probably ended up being about two desert spoons of extract, we kept adding and tasting ’til it was right)
• We then folded in the flour, substituting about a quarter of it for cocoa powder.
• We then added chopped up dark chocolate (don’t bother with chocolate chips, they are much more expensive and you can easily bash up a bar of chocolate and it works just as well)
• Then we just had to separate the mixture into cupcake cases (This quantity made 12 medium sized cakes)
• We baked for about 20-25 minutes at 180 degrees, but depending on the size of the cupcake this might have to be altered slightly.

And if you’re not too eager to eat them (like us) then you can obviously ice them to your preferred design.