Chocolate Peppermint Cupcakes

The mint chocolate combination has always been a classic pairing of flavours and one that is definitely popular in our household! This little combo is one I’ve been meaning to try for a while but just have too many on my list of things I’m dying to make. Hopefully one day you will see them all up on here. I am very fond of making cupcakes as the decoration and icing of them is fun! Plus the making of the cupcakes has become almost second nature so for me it’s all about the experimentation and presentation.

For these cupcakes I used my basic chocolate cupcake recipe which is the same as the one I used for my Chocolate Orange Cupcakes but with out the orange of course! I enjoy the speed of this recipe as once you've put all the ingredients in the bowl and mixed them you’re done! This mixture makes 16 cupcakes in standard sizes of 12 if you’re using slightly bigger than standard cupcake size like I did here.

I again, used my standard buttercream icing recipe for these cakes. I added a few teaspoons of peppermint flavouring to the mixture and found the more I added the more it affected the consistency meaning I needed to add more icing sugar to make in ‘pipe-able’ again. The flavouring I used wasn’t as minty as I would have perhaps liked it to be so I might look around for a better quality flavouring to use next time! I added a couple of drops of green food colouring to the mixture to make it look pepperminty.

While my cupcakes were cooling I melted some chocolate and put it in a piping bag and made some chocolate shapes to use as decorations. Simply pipe your desired shapes onto a tray lined with greaseproof paper and put in the fridge to set hard. Then all you need to do is use a small palette knife to remove them from the paper and voila! Your own handmade chocolate decorations. Delicious!