some chocolate ganache cupcakes

Six hours of baking this Saturday. 

My mum and I decided to bake to raise some money for the fund that keeps me in a job by taking some cupcakes to our church on Sunday morning and running a donations bucket. In six hours of baking we made and decorated 72 cupcakes and 50-odd shortbread butterflies. They flew off the foyer table (like hotcakes... ba dum tsh...), so much that lots of people were left complaining that they didn't get any... Altogether, my wonderful church family donated over two hundred pounds, all for a few cupcakes. Such lovely people.

(me with a tiny sample of all of the cupcakes we made)

I love to bake, but I wouldn't say I have an especially sweet tooth. My huge vice is bread, but I rarely eat the sweet things that I bake - part of the joy of baking comes in the sharing of food, in pleasing other people with delicate sweet things. 

So for that reason I love baking cupcakes. My church is full of some serious chocoholics, so some chocolate cupcakes were in order. I love ganache icing for the beautiful shine, and it was a new challenge for my mother to decorate with ganache, so that was the job. 

Here's my recipe, and some pictures.

chocolate ganache cupcakes.

The cupcake recipe is adapted from a Hummingbird Bakery recipe. With the ganache icing, these would be too rich to eat if made with butter alone, so for that reason, we use milk. Ensure the butter and dry ingredients are well-combined.

I usually decorate these with one raspberry apiece - sweet and simple. But on Saturday my mum came back with a Malteaser bar. A MALTEASER BAR. Who knew they existed? So we got overexcited and sliced them to decorate the cupcakes and they were amazing. I'm going to try baking them into the cake mix at some stage... stay posted...

pre- decoration

post-icing