Maple-Chocolate Cupcakes

Well, this recipe at All Recipes says that it makes 12 cupcakes. At least, it did after I scaled it to be 12 cupcakes. I'm working on loosing weight here, I don't really want any extra cupcakes. And the website did the math for me, although it did leave me with some mighty odd measurements. But the whole 12 cupcakes thing? It lies. I got 16 cupcakes anyway.

So, here's what I did.

For the Cupcakes:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup and 1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons and 3/4 teaspoon butter, softened
1 cup and 2 tablespoons white sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a cupcake pan. Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cocoa and salt. Set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well with each addition, then stir in the vanilla and maple syrup. Add the flour mixture alternately with the milk; beat well. Fill the cupcakes cups 2/3 full.

Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Leave in the pan for 3-5 min, then dump out onto cooling rack. They're really good just plain, but the chocolate is a much stronger flavor than the maple, and I was a bit disappointed in that. So I got to playing with the frosting.



For the frosting:

I didn't have time to make frosting, and I did have a tub of cream cheese frosting, which is Andy's favorite. So I started with that. Then I added somewhere around 1/2-3/4 cup of pure maple syrup, till the flavor reminded me a little bit of a pancake. It was runnier than I like, so I got out the powdered sugar and added enough to stiffen it up back to a nice spreading consistency. It was a fair amount, but I just dumped it in, so I have no idea how much it was.



They looked a little plain, so I dressed them up with some red sugar. I tried to be all fancy with it and only paint half the cupcake with the sugar, like I've seen some of the other cupcake people do, but it didn't turn out, so I just put sugar on the whole top. It turned out nice. Then I arranged them into a 1 because it's for Cupcake Hero's Project Baby. Except that I see that I did the one backwards. That would explain why every time I looked at it I thought "there's something wrong with this." But I never did figure out what exactly it was... until just now.