Chocolate Cream Cupcakes

When my mother was visiting, she came home from the bookstore with this issue of Cooks Country, and I sent her back to buy me a copy.  Largely for this recipe.  Make your own Hostess cupcakes?  How could anyone resist?

They are AMAZING.  The cupcakes are ridiculously light and airy, barely anything at all.  And the cream filling is a mixture of marshmallow fluff and butter and gelatin and water and vanilla, so it has a light and fluffy texture, too.  There’s also a chocolate icing made from bittersweet chocolate chips, which adds a bit of not-quite-so-sweet contrast.

They were also a lot less labor intensive than they looked.  You just cut off the top of the cupcakes, and then I used a melon baller to empty out the cupcakes a bit.  The icing on top covers the seam, and then if you want to be super fancy you pipe the swirls across the top.  I found that a rubber-coated baby spoon was the best icing spreader: two spoonfuls of icing, and then it was just the right size to very neatly push the icing to the edge of each cupcake.  I probably should have used a smaller icing bag tip for prettier curls, but that’s overthinking.

Awesome recipe, and they look really impressive.  This would be fun to make for a children’s party.

Chocolate Cream Cupcakes, from Cook’s Country Best Country Recipes: Every Recipe Testing, and Tasting from the Third Season of Cook’s Country from America’s Test Kitchen, pg 24.