Food coloring paste, I'm using
Grape Violet
Gold
chocolate button (or any
candy coated chocolate)
1 recipe Chocolate Ganache, recipe follows
Special equipment: 1 (12-cup) cupcake pan or 3 (12-cup) mini-cupcake pans with appropriately sized paper baking cups
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
For the cupcakes:
Put all the ingredients for the cupcakes except the
milk into a
food processor and blitz furiously. Then pour in the milk, and process again until you have a smooth
batter. Divide the mixture between either the big
muffin pans or the 3 small pans.
Cook the big cupcakes for about 15 to 20 minutes, and the small ones for about 10 minutes, although you might need to keep a closer eye on the little ones. Cool the cupcakes on a wire rack.
For the icing:
To ice the mini-cupcakes, mix the confectioners' sugar with a tablespoon or 2 of water from a recently boiled kettle or cold water (according to package instructions) for instant royal icing until you have a smooth, spreadable paste. In both cases add water slowly: you don't want this runny, and nothing is more irritating than having to start sifting more sugar. The merest, tiniest blob of food-coloring paste- in this case, as I said, Grape Violet - will be enough to bring a dizzy and rich-toned intensity to the proceedings; you can always add more coloring if you want, but again the important thing is to guard against having to do any more sifting. And if you have been too heavy-handed and landed yourself with a batch of unusable dark icing, then just make up some more plain white icing and add to tone down.
Slice any peaking humps off the tops of the
cakes with a sharp knife and then pour, from a dunked-in spoon, the icing over each cake until the tops are thickly and smoothly covered. Let stand for a couple of minutes until the icing has set a tiny bit and then
dot a gold button or other decoration of your choice on top.
Chocolate Ganache:
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