Cupcakes

I made some more of my chocolate cupcakes for parkrun tomorrow. They contain, but are not, burnt.

It’s my friend’s 100th volunteering milestone tomorrow. The milestones each have their own colour; 100 is black.

I added charcoal powder to the mix to darken the cakes. I could’ve added more, perhaps, but then I wouldn’t know if they were actually burning or not ;)

The last time I made 100 milestone cakes, I did them in the air fryer, which is really just a small convection oven, and they came out weird. I make these cupcakes in the proper oven. I would use the combi-microwave oven’s oven, but the tin doesn’t fit.

I again had the quandary of how to mark them as being 100-milestone specific. Last time, I used a lot of black food colouring, and I knew there wouldn’t be much left. What I should’ve done was to add cocoa to the icing so it went dark brown, then I would’ve needed far less colouring to make it look black.

I thought this time, I’d do that, but using powdered charcoal instead of food colouring. As it was, I was two grams short of cocoa for the cake mix, so there was none left over for the icing after all.

I whipped up a glacé icing and swirled in some charcoal powder. It didn’t seem to take a huge amount to turn it black, so I splopped it on the cakes and put them in the fridge before the icing could dribble any more.

After a while, we taste-tested one: up to snuff :)