Chocolate Coffee Cupcakes with Whisky buttercream

To celebrate my brother’s promotion, I’ve decided to make chocolate coffee cupcakes with whisky buttercream. No fear, I’m making chocolate buttercream for the kiddos because this isn’t England where the legal drinking age in a private home is 5 yrs old. (Seriously, check Wikipedia, I’m not making this up.)

I’ve taken my favourite 1 bowl chocolate cake recipe and instead of making a 9-inch cake, I made 24 cupcakes.

Preheat oven to 180C/350F

Ingredients:

2 cups All-purpose flour

3/4 cup cocoa

1.5 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda/bicarbonate of soda (depending on what you call it)

1 tsp vanilla essence

2 cups sugar (I prefer brown, but white is also fine)

1 cup milk

1/2 cup oil

1 cup hot coffee

2 eggs

pinch of salt.

(The above order of ingredients ensures dry ingredients are measured first so you can then use the same measuring cups to do the wet ingredients without having to clean them in between.)

Mix all of the above ingredients in 1 bowl with a whisk or wooden spoon. No beaters/mixers required!

Either grease and line a 9-inch cake pan or line a muffin pan with cupcake cups.

Cooking times: 

9-inch cake: bake for 40 mins, then start checking with a skewer until it comes away clean. The original recipe for this said to bake for an hour but it was a brick at that length of time. Start checking from the 40 min mark and go 5 extra mins at a time after that if needed.

If you’re doing cupcakes, 15 mins is all you need for the skewer to come away clean. If your oven is slightly cooler, check every 2 mins after 15 mins mark.

Buttercream:

2 cups unsalted butter, beat until fluffy

Gradually add in 4-5 cups of icing/confectioners sugar, beating after each addition until mixed in completely.

At this point I split the frosting into 2 bowls, to 1 bowl I added 2 tbsp of cocoa powder and mixed in completely with a hand mixer.

To the other bowl I added 4 teaspoons of whisky and mixed in. The mixture was a bit runny so I added a bit more icing/confectioners sugar to stiffen it up.

The kiddos are getting chocolate icing and the grown-ups are sailing into cupcakes decorated with a divine 12-yr old single malt. Because that’s how we roll!