Best Chocolate Cupcakes Ever -- Tuesdays with Dorie

A huge thank you to the oh so sweet Clara at I Heart Food4Thought who picked Dorie's Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes for the TWD sweet treat of the week! You can visit her website for the complete recipe as written in Dorie's book Baking From My Home To Yours.

It has been way too long since I've made any kind of cupcakes, and I'm not a huge chocolate fan so I would probably never have made these if it wasn't for Clara and TWD. Thank you again, Clara! I did make a couple small changes to the recipe, noting that some people had trouble with dry cupcakes -- and I hate dry baked goods -- I added an extra 1/4 cup of buttermilk, so instead of using 1/2 cup I used 3/4. I also weighed my one cup of all purpose flour, which was suggested at the TWD site regarding dry Dorie recipes, I ended up with 131 grams of flour. My other changes were to use two whole eggs, not the one whole egg and one yolk, probably just because I was too lazy to seperate the egg and figured than an extra egg white wasn't going to make or break this recipe.

My third change was to use one ounce of Scharffen Berger bittersweet chocolate, and one ounce of Baker's s brand semisweet chocolate -- Dorie's recipe called for two ounces of bittersweet, and I'm not a huge bittersweet fan, so went half and half with semisweet -- PERFECTO!

The baking time of about 23 minutes was right on, and the oven temperature, 350, was also just perfect! I think the fact that I baked these in silicone muffin cups on an insulated cookie sheet just added to the super moist crumb and no dry edges or bottoms, this will be my new standard for baking cupcakes from now on, no more dry bottoms from cupcakes in muffin tins.

I did not use the chocolate glaze, instead going for a simple buttercream frosting with cocoa powder mixed in, and the kids had a blast decorating these for Halloween :) I really can't say enough about how perfect these turned out, they were the best chocolate cupcake I've ever had in my entire life, seriously, and I am not a chocolate cupcake fan, I'd rather have a carrot cake cupcake, vanilla cupcake, even a pumpkin cupcake would beat out chocolate in my book, but man oh man, these are some converting cupcakes! If you've read any of my other TWD posts you will know that I'm usually honest and have been a touch picky with Dorie's recipes as of late, but these have taken away any doubt I had. These are amazing (with my minor adjustments)! I can see me making the whenever I might need a chocolate cupcake, especially when birthday season in our family rolls around. I think these would also be superb with a coconut pecan frosting, like a German Chocolate Cupcake -- YUM!

Please excuse the following picture overload of my oldest kiddos...they had SO much fun :)

This was a wonderful TWD experience - from the decorating with the kids to having amazing tasting finished cupcakes, just what good baking is all about :) Oh, just had to add, my two year old gave an unsolicited big smile "mmm, SO NUMMY" when he took a bite of these little gems!