So, a bottle of wine down, I’d been baking cakes all night and didn’t fancy stopping. I fancied making chocolate cupcakes, but I’d already made a chocolate red velvet cake (for Lytton’s 1st birthday party)… so I knew I wanted to mix it up a little. “SPICE!”, said my drunken brain. “You like chilli chocolate, don’t you! Spicy cupcakes”! I knew I had seen a recipe for spicy chai cupcakes before, but couldn’t be bothered to find it. Therefore I simply decided that I’d use a standard chocolate cupcake mix and… just add what I normally put in my curries.
RECIPE FOLLOWS:
250g self raising! flour
250g sugar
50g cocoa
100g butter (think I used a bit more “for luck”)
320ml milk (i remember this quantity in cups though rather than ml, it’s 1.5 US cups which I think is 320ml if you want to measure)
1 tbsp chilli powder
1.5 tbsps cumin
1.5 tbsps or maybe 2 tbsps garam masala
1 tbsp coriander
2 x eggz
This gives you a moist and springy chocolate cake and is a piece of p1ss. Cooking instructions = put everything apart from the eggs into a bowl, mix until incorporated. Then add the eggs and mix a bit more. Then cook for approx 15-20.
The recipe on it’s own gives you a really lovely moist gooey chocolate cupcake – if I were doing this again I’d probably use a drier more fairy cake like version. I think these worked quite well – I made “miniatures” which suffered a bit from being too moist, not so much of a problem with the full sized version.
These cakes are definitely INTERESTING! People commented on the chilli heat which really came through after the first couple of bites. “Gingerbread but without the ginger?? And with chocolate??” was another comment. It’s strange, they didn’t taste “spicy” per se… they tasted “curryish”… but yet it worked! I think if I were trying these again perhaps I’d leave out the coriander – I think something was rounding out the flavours a bit (I sort of know what I mean by this) – sort of blunting the spice AND chocolate elements. I’d do this again with a drier cupcake mix and tweak the spice levels. And maybe with less than a bottle of wine inside me slowly pickling my guts.
Oh, icing! I did ice a few of these with a simple cream cheese icing with added poppyseeds for a bit of bite. It was nice – we thought maybe a citrusy icing could work well next time. I’m not sure where I stand on cream cheese icing, it’s nice and all but it’s never really SOLID enough! But your traditional buttercream would be a bit too much! Next time I think it will be whipped icing sugar and some… lime juice? This is putting the spice element over towards Mexico rather than India…
ANYWAY! As experiments go I think this was quite successful and recommend that curry and cake lovers join me by raiding their spice cupboards :)
Edit: am very pleased to see someone else has been mad enough to try making these themselves! Anyone else?? :)