In September of 2009, I started a cupcake adventure. If you haven't read about it yet, you can do so here. ***
((I know this is a Christmas post and it's February. I also know some people who just took down their Christmas tree, so at least I'm not that far behind...))
The first step in making Christmas Peppermint Chocolate Cupcakes is to steep 4 bags of Peppermint tea in hot water for several minutes.
While the tea was 'brewing', I mixed together the chocolate chips, butter, and sugar.
I also got my Christmasy cupcake papers ready to be filled.
Then, I poured the hot tea over the chocolate chip mixture (it made the weirdest bubbles!)
The mixture was then stirred together until everything was nice and soupy.
The chocolate/butter/tea mix was then added to the dry ingredients to make the chocolate batter.
Meanwhile, I got the egg whites whipping in the mixer.
From there, they were folded into the liquid chocolate.
Few things are as potent as this stuff right here:
But it's sooooo good when you add it to a bowl of cream cheese icing.
Since the icing called for crushed up candy canes, I grabbed a dozen...
and experimented with my food processor (note: not the best method--makes them more like dust than nice, yummy chunks.)
So, I switched to the old stand-by method: Ziplock bag and a rolling pin!
Mmm...peppermint cream cheese icing with candy cane chunks.
LOOK at that!
So...I should've remembered to divide the batter out to more cups than the recipe called for. If I had, I wouldn't have experienced this overflow:
But...moving on! I just gently peeled away the part that overflowed. The cupcakes looked a little raw around the edges, but since I wasn't selling these, their 'look' didn't matter much.
And once a cupcake is iced, who really cares anyway, right?!
As a group, they looked so tempting.
Individually, they were pretty darn tempting, too. :)
Yummy!!