Tuesdays With Dorie: Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes

This weeks Tuesdays with Dorie was chosen by Clara of I Heart Food4Thought she chose Dorie’s Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes on pages 215-217 of Baking: From My Home to Yours.  It took be awhile to getting around to making these bcause I was trying to be good about sweets lately.  But that never really works.  I finally put these off to the last minute and made the Monday night.

While reading the Q & A message board for the recipe this week.  I noticed a few members saying that the cupcakes turned out dry.  I immediately thought that I would actually have to make the recipe carefully and be sure to follow Dorie’s directions specifically.  Well that went out the window when I ended up making the cupcakes so late.  I take a few short cuts and don’t exactly mix all my dry ingredients together before I add them to the wet.  I have a tendency to do that a lot since I am trying not to dirty a lot of dishes.

The first thing I noticed was that the batter was really thick and not as dark compared to other chocolate cupcakes that I have made in the past.  The struck me as odd.  The batter was more of the consistency of a brownie batter than a cake or cupcake.  I decided to go with it and see what happened.  The cupcakes ended up baking up perfectly in 22 minutes.  When I took them out of the oven some of the tops had little cracks; much like what you would see on the top of a brownie.  I decided to compare and contrast and pulled out Dorie’s cookbook to check the picture of the cupcake to make sure that it was suppose to be that pale in color, and it was.

To decorate these I was going to do the same decorations that Dorie did in the book, but some of the members had a good idea to decorate them for Halloween.  I figured that this was a good idea so I melted some white chocolate, placed it in a parchment cone, piped circles on my cupcakes, dragged a toothpick through the lines in alternating directions, and Voila Spiderweb 🙂

The cupcakes turned out pretty good.  They were actually very cakey.  Which is something that I wasn’t expecting at all.  The glaze actually balanced out the flavors and it was nice.  Usually when I think of a chocolate cupcake or chocolate cake I think of a moist cake :shrugs:.  I think these would be good with chocolate buttercream on top.  Maybe next time 🙂