Recipe: Hazelnut & Chocolate Cupcakes

I was lucky enough to get Amazon gift vouchers for Christmas this year, so as well as some lovely new boots, some earrings and a pair of Converse (lordy, I adore Chucks), I got the best-selling recipe book by Tarek Malouf, The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. The book has a huge reputation as one of the best; you only have to read the reviews. With this in mind, I was hopeful that they would all be tried and tested recipes, baked in a home kitchen with domestic ovens, so that the little person (me) can get good results. I followed this as much to the letter as I possibly could, so….we’ll see shall we?

(The choice of cover endorsement from Gwyneth Paltrow is a little odd I feel).

It was Mr BMB’s birthday at the weekend, so I promised I’d bake him whatever he wanted from the book. He usually goes for chocolate cake, so no surprises here then; hazelnut and chocolate cupcakes are go.

Ingredients for 12 cakes:

100g plain flour

20g cocoa powder

140g caster sugar

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

a pinch of salt

40g butter

120 ml whole milk

1 egg

120g hazelnut & chocolate spread

hazelnuts to decorate

Here’s what the book says are the ingredients for the frosting, but as you’ll see when I get to this bit, I found there was wa-a-a-ay too much. But I guess it depends on your preference for cake to icing ratio:

250g icing sugar, sifted

80g unsalted butter

25 ml whole milk

80g hazelnut & chocolate spread

First things first: Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F), Gas mark 3. Measure out all your ingredients before you start, it makes things sooo much easier than measuring as you go. Sounds obvious I know, but if you’re a tad impatient with cooking & baking (like me), you’ll fall into this trap and it’s a messy, frustrating trap, let me tell ya.

Prepare a 12-hole bun tray with cake cases. I used the standard little white cake cases and these held just the right amount of batter.

I’d also recommend that your butter is left in a warm-ish place to get REALLY soft. Mine was left at room temperature as per the recipe instructions, but as it’s currently witch’s tit-like in my kitchen, I needed to soften it first. I’d recommend Mary Berry’s clever tip which has changed my baking life:. I saw it on the Great British Bake Off Masterclass and it is hands-down one of the best baking tips EVER. Linky-link HERE.

All praise our Queen Mary, for she is AWESOME.

Put the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter into a bowl (or your electric mixer). I really like my little electric hand-mixer, even though we have a fancy-shmancy Kenwood mixer.

The one disadvantage of this method of mixing is that my hand-mixer doesn’t have a particularly slow speed, so when you start it sends clouds of icing sugar and cocoa powder all over the shop. For this reason, I’d say, start the process by hand with a wooden spoon, just until most of the powdery element has merged with the sugar. Or you can try draping a tea-towel over the bowl for the first 30 secs or so. The book doesn’t tell you this, so I looked like I’d been antiqued a-la-Jackass. You live and learn. Continue mixing until you get a sandy consistency and everything is combined. Then slowly add the milk while still mixing and once that’s all combined, add the egg and beat well until you get a sloppy batter that makes ribbons on the surface that disappear after a few seconds. Don’t forget to scrape down the sides of your bowl so you don’t get any rogue crunchy sugary bits in your mix *shudder*

Spoon the mixture into your cases up to about two thirds full and bake in the centre of the oven for about 20 minutes, then check them to see if they bounce when touched lightly. If it leaves a dent, put them back in for another 3-5 minutes. Once you’re happy that they’re done, take them out and leave them to cool in the tray for 10 mins then turn them out onto a rack to completely cool down.

Once they’re cool, scoop out a small circular hollow in the centre of each cake with a sharp knife.

Eat all of the little scooped out hats before the OH knows about it – cook’s privelege :o)

Fill each little hollow with a teaspoon of the chocolate spread. Try and resist the temptation to eat a spoonful of spread straight from the jar in a ‘one for the cake, one for me’ style. This results in you feeling quite sick and not wanting to eat any of the cakes when they’re done. Trust me on this.

And now the frosting. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened when I followed the recipe and let you decide how much frosting to put on your cakes. For me there was probably about twice as much as I wanted, so I have a container of leftover frosting in my freezer now. I’ve no idea how well it will keep, but I’ll edit the post at some point in the future to let you know if it’s worth making too much for future cakes.

Place the icing sugar and SOFTENED butter in a bowl and beat them together, bearing in mind what I said earlier about coating your entire kitchen in a light dusting of icing sugar. I ‘pushed’ the ingredients together with a wooden spoon until all the powder was abosrbed. Then add the milk gradually using the electric mixer to continually blend everything together. When all the milk is incorporated, turn the mixer to a high speed and beat until it’s light and fluffy, for at least 5 minutes. Then stir in the chocolate spread and smother each cake with your preferred amount of frosting. I used a butter knife but I guess you could use an icing bag and pipe it on. It’s a good consistency for doing either.

Then top each cake with either halved or chopped hazelnuts. (I actually used chopped mixed nuts for this because they were so much cheaper than hazelnuts.)

Et voilà!

This is obviously the first recipe I’ve tried from this book, but if they’re all as easy to follow as this, and if all the results are as good as this, I’ll be more than happy with the £4.99 I paid (or actually, didn’t pay, as it was a present) for it. The only gripe I had with this recipe was the amount of frosting I had left over (pictured below), but, if you happen to like your cakes to be half and half (yak) then by all means, pile it high.

The cake was just chocolatey enough and the frosting was a lot better that others I’ve tried (notably, the cakes I’ve scoffed from Angel Food Bakery have a very sickly frosting which I don’t like at all) and the addition of the chocolate spread was just enough to give it an extra bit of PHWOOOOAR.

You can read about The Hummingbird Bakery and it’s owner and author of the book here.