Best Ever Chocolate Cupcakes

These chocolate cupcakes are likely to be the best ever cupcakes that you will ever eat. The cupcakes start with a light and fluffy chocolate cake batter and then get finished with the most incredible chocolate buttercream. Decadence, indulgence, and amazing are good ways to describe the cupcakes that this recipe makes. The other awesome part to this recipe is that with little effort the cupcakes come out looking like something a professional would have made.

Preparing the Cupcake Batter

To start the cupcake batter, in the bowl on a stand mixer, add eggs, sugar, brown sugar, vegetable oil and vanilla extract. Turn the mixer onto a medium speed and mix for about 1 minute, to ensure everything is thoroughly combined. When mixing the batter, you could also use a hand mixer or simply mix by hand as an alternative to the stand mixer.

Next, sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the sifted ingredients, along with the buttermilk to the egg mixture. Mix everything together on a low speed until just combined. To keep the cupcakes light and fluffy, it’s important that we don’t overmix the batter.

Baking the Chocolate Cupcakes

Line muffin trays with 20 cupcake liners and fill each liner with enough batter so that the cupcake liners are just under half full. This is usually about 1 Tablespoon of batter per liner. It should be emphasized that when doing this, DO NOT overfill the cupcake liners. This cake batter rises considerably, and overfilled cupcakes will rise too much and then likely collapse in the centre.

The cupcake batter should be baked in a moderate oven for 16-18 minutes. To test the cupcakes are done, insert a skewer in the middle. The skewer should come out clean. After removing the cupcakes from the oven, allow them 5 minutes to rest. Remove the cupcakes from the muffin trays and then transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Preparing the Buttercream Frosting

For this recipe, we have chosen to make a simple chocolate buttercream frosting to ice the top of the cupcakes. To make the buttercream frosting, start by adding the butter to the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix the butter on a medium speed for 1-2 minutes, until the butter is creamy. Another indicator is color, the butter will go a more pale yellow color when beaten sufficiently.

To the butter, add in the icing sugar, cocoa powder, cream, salt and vanilla. Sift in the dry ingredients before adding them here to ensure there isn’t any lumps in the mixture. Turn the mixer on to a low speed and mix for 30 seconds. Increase the speed to high and beat for another minute, until the buttercream mixture is thoroughly combined.

You could if you wanted to, also add in some flavoring to the buttercream. Orange or lemon essence go nicely with this recipe.

Finishing the Chocolate Cupcakes

To finish the cupcakes, transfer the buttercream frosting to a piping bag fitted with a small star nozzle. Use the piping bag to pipe swirls of frosting onto each cupcake. I find it best to start swirling from the outside into the middle when doing this.

I used to think piping was a hard skill. What I’ve found is that if you just go with a bit of confidence, they usually turn out alright. I find the star-shaped nozzle also helps to make them look impressive with very little effort.

At this point the chocolate cupcakes can be finished as is, or you may choose to top with a dusting of sprinkles. I recently purchased a container that had a variety of sprinkle colors in it, which matched amazingly well with the different colored cupcake liners that I used. Chocolate sprinkles also look great as an alternative.

If the cupcakes aren’t too be eaten straight away, store them in the fridge. The cupcakes will keep quite well in an airtight container for up to 3 days. Remove them from the fridge at least 30 minutes before serving, allowing time for the buttercream to soften.