Chocolate Malted Cupcakes

Chocolate Malted Cupcakes

Mmmmm... Chocolate... Malted... Cupcakes....

I had the chance to do some more birthday time baking recently, so I jumped at the chance to bake a batch of these beautiful little babies. I had made these once before, sometime last year, and didn't get the chance to do a photo shoot with them, so this time, I made sure that we got some quality time in front of the camera.

It was a perfect Saturday morning, I woke to the excitement of making it a baking kind of day. I put some coffee on, and gathered all my ingredients...

I quickly got to work, this time, I used this recipe from The Culinary Chronicles. I found it to be a perfect recipe, my only changes were that I did not add the crushed malted milk balls to the batter, (because I did not want crunchy bits in my cake), and I did not use coffee in my buttercream frosting.

Before and after...

Once I had the batter done and the last batch in the oven, I got to work on the buttercream frosting. I was a bit nervous about doing a buttercream, because I have had some not so great luck with buttercream before. And my last experience with buttercream was when a former classmate called me in a panic asking how to save his buttercream frosting, as it wasn't quite thick enough. I didn't know what to tell him on the spot, in fear of giving him wrong information and making his situation worse. I quickly did a Google search for him and found that if he chills the frosting, that should thicken it up. He ended up freezing the frosting and it never came back to life. I sort of knew that it wasn't save-able, when he told me that he added melted butter to it. I told him to toss that batch and start over, but he was out of ingredients. Adding melted butter will destroy a buttercream. It will make it too runny and it will not come back to proper consistency. That is my belief anyway. So if you think that using melted butter to save time on bringing your butter to room temp, think again.

And never use just butter for your buttercream frosting, as it will be very unstable. Using half shortening and half butter will make it much more stable. However, if it is a hot day, or it will be outside for a long period of time, use all shortening, forget about using any butter. Using butter makes any buttercream very unstable, as the butter will obviously begin to melt.

I was so incredibly happy, ecstatic, pleased, thrilled, tripping the light fantastic, that my buttercream came out wonderfully perfect. Hooray! Rocky even came by to witness such an exciting event...

Ok so now that we have the buttercream whipped to perfection, it is time for some quality control testing, phase 1, initiate now....

Pass!

And now that all my pieces to the Chocolate Malted Cupcake puzzle are in order, it was time for my favorite part, putting the pieces together to form a perfect little package...

Soooo purty...

and absolutely delicious...