Coffee and Chocolate Cupcakes

It's a friends birthday tomorrow so because I'm such an awesome friend, I decided to make her a cupcake to go with her presents. I baked a one egg recipe making five coffee cupcakes (forgot to take photos of that bit), adding dry coffee pushed through a tea strainer rather than making it into a paste with boiling water as I find this curdles the mixture.

I then made a sticky chocolate icing to separate the coffee cake and the coffee icing, using 75% cocoa chocolate, icing sugar, butter and a secret ingredient ;)

I then spread the icing on the cakes with a teaspoon, and it looked sooo luxurious:

While they were cooling in my conservatory, I made up the coffee buttercream icing - as always I make too much as I find it quite hard to measure out the ingredients for buttercream. A lot of recipes tell you to double the icing sugar to the butter, but it still tastes buttery to me - so I usually use 1oz butter to 8oz sugar. Seems a lot I know, but it's worth it to make a better cake. Here's what my icing looked like:

Yum or what.

I let the icing cool in the fridge for about 30 mins and then I melted some left over chocolate onto some greaseproof paper, and a tupperwear lid:

(My friends name is Kirsty, so the K was for her cake only) and I was following a friend's idea to melt chocolate on a flexible surface to create my own chocolate sprinkles. It worked really well.

I piped the icing into a rose shape, not totally covering the cake so that the chocolate icing was on show, then added a malteaser onto each. I then crushed the rest of the malteasers, almost cried, then stuck the malt pieces into the coffee icing before scraping the melted chocolate from the lid to create sprinkles. 

Here's the finished cakes:

They look slightly like nipples, but I reckon they'll taste like cakes.

Kirsty

x