Chocolate Orange Cupcakes

These tasty chocolate orange cupcakes are my entry for Chocolate Log Blog's monthly 'we should cocoa' competition...and yes, you guessed it, all entries must include the magic ingredient...chocolate! Every month there is also a special ingredient which must be added. This month it was orange.

In terms of chocolate and orange, these cupcakes tick all the boxes and then some! The cakes themselves are chocolate sponges, made with melted chocolate rather than cocoa and then when cooling an orange juice and sugar syrup is drizzled over each one.

Finally, to top it off the buttercream has melted white chocolate in it, along with grated orange zest. The finishing touch is grated orange chocolate sprinkled over the completed cupcakes and a segment of Terry's Chocolate Orange... phew that's a lot of chocolate and orange!

The recipe for these cupcakes came from Jo Wheatley who baked them on the Great British Bake Off and you can find the recipe here.

I do like a good cupcake and these seemed like the perfect combination. However, if you're going to attempt them, here are some of my thoughts on the recipe as the methodolgy was slightly unusual!

1. The dry ingredients are pulsed in a food processor before adding the wet ingredients... they didn't mix very well and left little lumps which took a little bit of mixing in.
2. It only made 12 smaller cakes, so if you want to fill the bigger cupcake cases I would probably go for 10... and it's quite runny, so helpful to use a piping bag to fill the cases.
3. Don't be too hasty to add the white chocolate to the buttercream...as I was too quick and as it was quite hot, caused it to melt a little.
4. Wait a few minutes before piping the icing on... again I was too hasty and because it was very loose, my piping swirls didn't hold as well as they usually do!

The cakes were well received and I would certainly recommend the recipe, although it is slightly more time consuming than your average cupcake.

Happy baking!