Chocolate Chilli Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Icing

Chocolate and chilli is a combination that people either love, or are really skeptical about. I am a lover of this combo, but am so often disappointed that you can't taste any chilli or get any heat. So when I decided to try this combination for myself, I made sure the flavours and heat were there!

I used the chocolate red wine cake recipe, which is an absolute winner, I use that ALL the time now, it's my go to recipe. It's so versatile - if you don't want the red wine in there, use full cream milk instead. You can add all kinds of flavourings to make this batter into whatever kind of cake you like. It works as a cake, or as cupcakes. This time I used mini cupcake tray, which gives me 24 cupcakes (the mix actually yields more than that, I also filled a 12 hole cupcake tray as well!). This is a great recipe for parties because you get so many cupcakes out of it!

Make sure you try the batter before you cook it - if you can get a hint of chilli, then it's perfect. When the cupcakes bake, the cayenne pepper becomes more pronounced - you can taste it, and it's hotter! Don't worry - the icing balances it out perfectly!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Method

1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tray/prepare patty pans.

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but it's all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cayenne together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then use a teaspoon to fill the cupcake holes about 2/3 to the top.

4) Place the trays in the middle of the oven for 15 minutes (depends on the size of your trays though!) or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool before icing.

Now, the cream cheese icing... This isn't a recipe. It's just a guideline. I often find cream cheese icing gets really runny. I decided not to follow a recipe and just wing it. It worked.

I used a whole packet of cream cheese, and used my KitchenAid to beat it with about a 2/3 cup of icing sugar until it was sweet enough for me, double cream to take the savoury tang off the cheese, and some full cream milk just to loosen it up a bit (because the double cream was REALLY thick!). I added a heaped tsp of cinnamon as well. Just add these ingredients until you get to a consistency you can work with, whether you're piping or just using a palette knife. Use your instinct. 

I experimented with how I wanted the piping to look, though I'm really not much of a piper. I found out that I pipe slightly to the left! I actually quite like the look of having the stars and swirls mixed up on the stand.

These little cupcakes are perfect for high tea as well, which is handy as that is this months Sweet Adventures Blog Hop theme! Have a look at Delicieux, the host blog for this month!

Death by Chocolate - Clandestine Cake Club

WOW, our little cake club has grown! It started out as just 5 people who like to bake, and now look at it! We've been featured in a bunch of magazines, newspapers and websites, and our numbers are growing! We have some exciting new developments coming up as well, so keep your eyes peeled for announcements!

These were the kind of memories this theme evoked! Dress up party! I was a rockstar! But I look like a drag queen...

Our last meeting had a theme that everyone got excited about! Retro and childhood cakes had a lot of people reaching for the old Womans Weekly Birthday cookbook, myself included! We had some gorgeous cakes that so many people pointed at and shouted out "Hey I had that cake!!", it was so nice to bring back so many memories! I had quite a few cakes from that cook, the most memorable being for my 2nd birthday (though not sure HOW I remembered it, must be one of my earliest memories!) I had the train cake, with the coloured popcorn cargo! I loved it! My Mum went to so much effort for that cake... I was proud as punch, until Andrew Monk came and ripped the smoke stack off it and shoved it in his mouth! I cried, he got in trouble, and cried... I don't remember much past that though! Great party!

I decided not to do a cake from that book though, and do chocolate. That seems to be my forte - cakes never mess up when they're chocolate in my house! I remember my friend Jemma having sleepovers when we were a bit older, and she always had a death by chocolate cake from the local bakery. We thought it was just the height of over the top amazing cakes, and it was hands down the most delicious option for a cake, ever. Everyone kept peeking under the cardboard lid at it, wondering when we could have at it. This was the cake I would recreate!

I went with my old favourite, the chocolate red wine cake. I made 2, and sandwiched them together with Rachel Khoo's chocolate mousse. I then covered it in ganache, piped mousse, cream, and cocoa nibs. Death by chocolate indeed.

The recipe for the chocolate red wine cake can be found here.

The recipe for the chocolate mousse can be found here.

Here is what I ended up with! A little wonky with the piping, but a decent result!

We were really lucky to have the venue offered to us by Gregory Bruyer, who also happens to be a photographer! He took some gorgeous pics of all our cakes, including the one above.

Have a look at what our awesome bakers came up with!
*NOTE* The following photos are mine, not Gregory's - his are much better!

Pimped chocolate red wine cake

If there are 2 things in life that are meant to be together, it's chocolate and red wine. How many bad days are sorted out by a combination of these 2 magical things? Cake can sometimes fix a crap day too. If you know a monumentally shit day is coming up, then you'd better stock up on red wine and chocolate. and cake. 

Or better yet...

Make chocolate red wine cake!!

It is REALLY good. Moist, not too sweet and rich enough to feel good, but not too rich to make you feel sick. It's fab with ganache. Its just fab. 

This was my contribution to the first meeting of the Clandestine Cake Club. I had read about this cake club on facebook and other blogs, and thought well, why can't we be the first CCC in Australia? So I put it to my dear friend Carolanne, and we held our first meeting in April. Basically, people come bearing cake, and it very specifically states it must be CAKE - not cupcakes or brownies or tray bakes or pies. Cake. The Clandestine Cake Club started small - but its quality not quantity, and that, we had in spades! All the cakes were fabulous, Liv from Col Panna made a BRILLIANT apple pie cheese cake (which S devoured when he got home!), which was layered with caramel, pecans, cheesecake, and stewed apples. It was a OMG moment. Bri from Eat Meets West made a caramalised pear and apple semolina cake, which I had never had before. I loved the texture of the semolina, and found that it was even better the next day! Carolanne from Carolannes Kitchen made a bit of a layer cake extravaganza! Olive oil sponge with orange blossom water, coconut sugar, persimmon cream and delicious ganache. WOOAAH!

The other cakey contributions!

Each meeting has a theme and ours was autumnal fruits, as we wanted to be seasonal and take advantage of all the wonderful fruit we have at the markets at the moment. I chose to adorn my cake with pear and glaze it with the Maggies Place fig jam I got from my Urban Locavore box, being that pears and figs are at their peak right now!

This recipe will make one roughly inch high cake. Considering this was the Clandestine Cake Club, I upped the cake a notch and made the recipe twice, and sandwiched the 2 cakes together with dark chocolate ganache. It was a delicious tweak! I used the ganache recipe from Maggie Beers Harvest book, that goes along with the chocolate fig cake.

This recipe was adapted from the one I found at Smitten Kitchen. There are a few recipes floating around on the net, all pretty similar, so far, all great!

Ingredients
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
3/4 cup red wine
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 generous cup plain flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Method 
1) Preheat the oven to 160°C, and non stick your tin (I just gave my silicon mould a spray with canola oil). 

2) In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until it forms ribbons. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. At this point, the cake will look a little split, but its all good, it'll come together!

3) Sift the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and cinnamon together, and add to the wet ingredients. Mix gently until combined, then spread batter into the greased tin/mould. 

4) Slice up a pear into half cm slices, and arrange them gently on top of the batter in any pattern you like.

5) Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a skewer  comes out clean. Cool in pan for about 10 minutes, then flip out of pan and cool the rest of the way on a cooling rack. If you're using a silicon mould, wait until its completely cooled before turning the cake out.

6) Warm up a couple of tablespoons of fig jam in a small saucepan, and brush it over the cooled cake.

If you wish to add ganache just make sure the cake is fully cooled! The cake does not rise a huge amount, so I would make 2 cakes if you're looking to layer them - however would love to know how you go if you just cut one in half!