Devil's Food with Orange Buttercream

This was my second attempt of making cupcakes. The result was a whole lot of delicious chocolatey cupcakes with an almost perfect frosting, accept it was a bit too sweet (the frosting). Saty has started work again after her long confinement. So I had the kitchen all to myself. She was a tad bit unhappy because she missed the frosting making part.

I made the cupcakes a day in advance. The cupcake recipe was adapted from the Divine Devil's Food Cupcake by Linjen, which I found on Recipezaar. Actually it was just a minute adjustment and the cupcakes tasted really good. The recipe for Orange Buttercream Icing was taken from Wilton Cupcake Fun. Here's the complete adapted recipe for my second trial of cupcake baking.

Ty's Food for The Devil Cupcakes

2 cups cake flour
2/3 cup Van Houten cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup low-fat buttermilk
3/4 cup light butter, softened
1/3 cup water
1 3/4 cups sugar
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1. Heat oven to 180 degrees C. Line 24 regular size muffin cups with paper liners.

2. Mix flour, cocoa, salt baking powder and baking soda in large bowl. Combine buttermilk
and water in small bowl. Beat butter in another large bowl with mixer on medium high speed
until fluffy.

3. Add sugar and beat on until you don't feel nor see anymore sugar granules. Add eggs, one at a
time, beating well after each addition. Add in vanilla. Alternately add flour and buttermilk in 3
batches, beating just until blended. Spoon into cups, 1/2 to 2/3 full. Bake 20 - 25 minutes or
until toothpick comes out clean. Cool in pan on wire rack 5 minutes and then remove to a rack
and cool completely.


Orange Buttercream Icing

1/2 cup solid vegetable shortening
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 teaspoon Clear Vanilla Extract
4 cups sifted confectioners' sugar (approx. 1 lb.) 1 teaspoon Sunquick Orange cordial
2 tablespoons buttermilk
Zest of 1 orange, grated
2 drops of Orange Oil
Orange Icing Color (optional)

1. Beat butter and shortening with electric mixer.

2. Add vanilla.

3. Gradually add sugar, one at a time, beating well on medium speed.

4. When all sugar has been mixed in, add buttermilk and beat at medium speed until light and fluffy.

5. Stir in orange zest, orange cordial, orange oil and icing colour.

6. Pipe the icing on the cupcakes and add a few orange chocolate chips on top.

Our First Cupcake

After seeing a friend buying a box of beautiful, cute cupcakes, I fell in love and am now so keen to make my own. Furthermore after browsing hundreds of cupcakes' blogs and web pages, I am getting more and more crazy about cupcakes!

And so, last week my sister and I, in a haste, went on our first time ever experience on making our cupcakes. We were not prepared, as I just got home from Denver.

Therefore, assuming we have everything in the kitchen, we began our project only to find out we are out of granulated sugar. We were too lazy to run to the shop to restock it so we simply used some raw sugar instead.

We used the Lemon Citrus Cupcakes recipe from the book The Artful Cupcake by Marcianne Miller. The recipe requires the usage of lemon and orange zest and juice, which we also did not have. For that, we substituted all the citrus ingredient with some orange oil.

As for the frosting, we used the Classic Buttercream Frosting recipe from the same book. We had to make 2 batches of frosting because one was not enough. We used some ready rolled-fondant to decorate the cupcakes too.

The result : The cake looks alright from far but if you look at it closely, you can see the granules of the raw sugar everywhere on its surface. It taste just alright but if you eat too much, you can taste the bitterness of the orange oil. The second batch of buttercream frosting we made was too buttery in taste, probably because we tried to reduce the amount of confectioners' sugar. We didn't want to make it as sweet as the first batch. The first batch was way too sweet. And we had everything done according to the recipe. The rolled-fondant didn't taste so nice either. I think that's why Chockylit hardly use them in her recipe.

In the looks department however, I have to say that our cupcakes didn't look so bad. Most of the decorating tasks anyways, was done by Saty (my sister).