Recipe: S'mores Cupcakes

Pinch punch first of the month. Happy October everyone! October is a month that sets my soul on fire. I think it's a mixture of it finally being Autumn paired with being closer to my birthday as well Halloween fast approaching. And before I start barraging you with Halloween content, I thought I'd share with you a recipe I wanted to post in September but life got in the way and I had to push it back a month. Today I'll be sharing with you my simple recipe for S'mores inspired cupcakes.

A moist chocolate sponge topped with crush cookie pieces, marshmallow buttercream and even more crushed cookie pieces, this is a cupcake take on the popular American camping snack which never fails to make me think of Autumn when mentioned.

Ingredients
100g Caster Sugar
100g Stork/Margarine, softened
100g Self Raising Flour
2 Eggs
25g Cocoa Powder
1 Teaspoon of Liquid Cocoa Extract
Marshmallow Buttercream
3 Chocolate Chip Cookies, crumbled
 
Method 
1- Pre heat oven to 180C. Line a twelve hole muffin tin with paper cases.
2- In a bowl place the softened butter and caster sugar. Beat until soft and creamy in texture and pale in colour. I always advise scraping around the sides to make sure all the sugar and butter is beaten together and you don't end up with lumps of unbeaten butter and sugar in your mixture.
3- Add one egg at a time followed by a tablespoon of flour and beat until fully incorporated into the mixture. I tend to scrape repeatedly around the edges of the bowl during this stage as the flour usually ends up stuck to the sides of the bowl, especially with a stand mixer.
4- Once both eggs have been beaten into the mixture, gently fold the rest of the flour into the mixture. Take your time with this step. It's easy to get carried away with increasing the speed but it does nothing but knock all the air out of your mixture and will leave you with a dry, tough cake.
5- When the flour is completly folded in, fold the cocoa powder and the liquid cocoa extract into the mixture. Again take your time with this but don't forget to scrap gently around the edges so nothing is left sitting at the edges.
6- Once everything is fully incorporated, spoon your mixture into your cases. Then take your crumbled cookies and sprinkle a small amount of the top of your cupcakes. This adds an extra crunch to the cupcake and gives you more in a mouthful than a plain sponge would.
7- Bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. I used to cook my cakes for longer but found that they were drier than I'd like in texture, especially those with cocoa powder in them. Less cooking time is what gives them that moist texture that doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth, essenitally making eating it a hard job.
8- Once cooked, leave to cool in the tin for five minutes before transfering to a wire cooling rack to cool completely.
9- Now it's on to the buttercream. I made a batch last week to decorate my Hot Chocolate inspired cupcakes and found I still had tons left over once I'd iced all twelve cupcakes. So I popped it in a tub and froze it to use at a later date. I had no idea if it could be frozen or if it would even taste the same defrosted but it was worth the try. And it worked. I defrosted the buttercream whilst I took a quick (and expensive) trip to Homesense and when I got home, it had defrosted lovely. All that was needed was a little mix to loosen it up to a piping consistency again and I was ready to go. Give my Hot Chocolate Cupcake recipe a read for the recipe for Marshmallow Buttercream.
10- Once the icing is at piping consistency, gently pipe it across the tops of all twelve cooled cupcakes. Don't worry if it's not perfect, my piping skills are terrible but practice always makes perfect.
11- When each cupcake is iced, take the remainder of your crumbled cookies and sprinkle over the top before leaving to set. Then all that's left to do is enjoy them.