Extremely Dark Chocolate Cupcakes

This chocolate cupcake, my version of Black Forest Cake, was supposed to be my entry to Sugar High Friday # 27: Chocolate by Brand hosted by David Lebovitz. I missed the January 22 deadline but I am still posting the finished cupcakes. For the chocolate I chose Hershey cocoa mixed with black cocoa from King Arthur Flour Company. The black cocoa gives the cakes a really dark and deep chocolate flavor. The recipe I used for the batter is the one on the Hershey label because of its simplicity, does not use butter, and the cakes always come out moist. You can use your favorite chocolate cake recipe but substitute no more than ¼ cup black cocoa.

Extremely Dark Chocolate Cupcakes
makes 30 cupcakes

2 cups sugar
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup Hershey's cocoa
¼ cup black cocoa
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
½ cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup boiling water
cherry brandy
morello cherries

• Cupcakes: Heat oven to 350°F. Line two 12-cup and one 6-cup muffin pans with paper bake cups. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil, and vanilla and beat on medium speed for 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin). Fill cups 2/3 full. Bake for 22 - 25 minutes. Let cool on wire rack.
• Kirschwasser syrup: Boil 1 cup sugar with 1 cup water for 2 minutes, let cool a little, add ½ cup kirschwasser/cherry brandy.
• To serve: Peel off paper liners from cooled cupcakes, dip in syrup. Serve with slightly sweetened whipped cream and morello cherries.

You can also bake this cake using two 9-inch layer cake pans, slice each cake in half, moisten all 4 layers with syrup, layer the second with halved morello cherries, ice each layer, top, and sides with slightly sweetened whipped cream. Decorate all over with chocolate curls or shavings. Please do not use canned cherry pie filling, that would be awful. :=)

Marrons Glacés

The marrons glacés are almost perfect, I have to adjust the icing though as it crystalized overnight. I only learned this morning I should use glucose to prevent the icing from crystalizing and they have to be consumed right away (no problem there). The broken ones are wonderful as vanilla ice cream topping. I would have preferred the European or Japanese jumbo chestnuts but they are not available here and the fairly large Italian ones I bought the past years were not so good, half of them were rotten. These same size as Italian chestnuts from Korea were fresher and there were very few bad nuts (they probably are in the North, just kidding). I will be featuring, actually reminiscing about, chestnuts in future post. I was going to throw the glaze that's stuck on the cookie rack and sheet but my daughter suggested we use it to sweeten coffee or tea. And she is absolutely right, the sugar has a faint vanilla and chestnut flavors, we started picking and eating them! Mmmm, sugar...