Chocolate Cupcakes

I don't have much of a sweet tooth, space in my kitchen or fridge to store things like cookies and muffins, or much of a desire to ingest all that sugar.

That being said, once and a while the baking vein hits me and I take advantage of an invitation to someone else's house to make something sweet - thus guaranteeing that I don't eat the whole thing myself. I particularly love to make cupcakes - mostly because whenever I go to the States I am uncontrollably drawn to buying huge quantities of those super cute cupcake papers (muffin cups?). This time, I decided to go for chocolate cupcakes, given the massive bar of it that had been sitting in my cupboard for months.

Finding a good cupcake recipe is kind of like deciding which chocolate cake recipe to use. When you try to look up something simple, the variations seem endless: flour, flourless, cream, sour cream, cocoa powder, baking chocolate, etc. After spending a morning browsing recipes, I finally decided on this one featured on the joy of baking website, mostly because I thought the entry was thoughtfully written and informative. I admit, I was too lazy to watch the video, but it looks promising.

For once I followed a recipe to the letter and the cupcakes were scrumptious; moist, tender, chocolatey and not too heavy. The only thing I didn't do that I should have, was follow the suggested times for beating the powdered sugar and butter for the icing and so mine came out kind of grainy - nothing that a few well-placed sprinkles couldn't fix (especially for the two 3 year olds in the audience).