You Can’t Have Just One

I don’t know what it is about Oreos, but they are one of the very few things in this world that everyone seems to love. I don’t think there is a single person I know who would turn down an oreo, and you really can’t say that for any other type of store bought cookie. Even if you just like the cookies themselves, or just the cream, they bring up so many happy chocolate-crumb-and-milk-mustache memories.

Well, several months ago (even before I made homemade oreos) I was blog surfing and saw these beautiful oreo cupcakes on Epicurian Escapsim. Yes, milk’s favorite cookie is now in cupcake form, and now that I have finally tried the recipe I gotta say, it will easily become a favorite.

How can anyone resist a crumbly, chocolatey cupcake that comes with an icing so creamy, it’s almost better than dunking the cookies themselves in milk 🙂

Oreo Cupcakes
Source: Epicurian Escapsim

180g unsalted butter
400g brown sugar
250g dark chocolate
3 large eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
200g plain flour
100g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
8 Oreo cookies, smashed to bits
1 3/4 cup milk

Icing:

225g unsalted butter
400 – 600g icing sugar (to taste)
1/4 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
3/4 cup marshmallow fluff
8 Oreo cookies, smashed to bits

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Set aside. Heat the oven to 180C and line cupcake tin with papers.

Beat the butter until it is soft, then add sugar and mix until fluffy.

Stir up the egg yolks, then add them to the butter and sugar. Add the vanilla and the chocolate.

Mix the flour, baking powder, soda in a bowl, then mix that in with the first mixture, alternating with the milk. Stir in the bashed Oreos until evenly distributed.

In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until peaks form. Fold in the batter, mixing well.

Scoop into the cupcake liners straight away, filling them 3/4 full. Bake for 20 minutes or until tester comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack before icing.

To make the icing, beat the butter, then add in the sugar gradually and mix well. Add milk and vanilla and continue to mix. Once this much is to your taste, stir in the fluff with a spatula. Add the bashed Oreos until the texture is even. Spread or pipe on the cupcakes and enjoy! 🙂

We left the bashed oreos out of the icing, opting to place half an oreo on top, and we only used approximately 200 g of the powdered sugar, but all of those options are completely to your taste. These are oreos after all, so have fun with it!

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Cupcakes Outside the Comfort Zone

I have mentioned that I am a picky eater. I know that I can be a little ridiculous with it sometimes, but it isn’t really something I can control either. It’s just who I am. However, with the experimentation I am doing with this blog, I want to step outside of that comfort zone and get a little daring. (Keep in mind something daring for me will probably be normal for most bakers).

It’s probably a little ironic to use something as comforting as cupcakes (which bring up happy icing-covered memories) for something like this but the end result sounded great so I thought it would be a good idea to just dive in.

At this point you’re probably asking yourself what it is about this recipe that is so daring. It’s actually not one, but two things: mayonnaise and sour cream. The mayonnaise because of an incident when I was a kid making sandwiches with mom and tasted from the wrong knife….and the sour cream because of my great aversion to anything with the word “sour” (it took much googling to convince myself that the tart I made a couple months ago wouldn’t actually be “tart.”) I am sure there is a deeper meaning to that one too but I really don’t need to know all the varying depths of my insanity. 😉

Anyways, this recipe marries the wonderful goodness that is chocolate with two things I have taken great pains to avoid in the past, and thank god it turned out well. I also had a new and very enthusiastic helper, who ended up wearing almost as much chocolate as we put in this, so I was too busy enjoying the company, the chocolate, and the scent of these to-die-for cupcakes to really worry about the end result. Which, by the way, really did turn out incredible. 🙂

Mint Cupcakes
Slightly adapted from: The Reckless Chef

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
3 oz chocolate, finely chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons mint extract
2/3 cup water
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon sour cream

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix your dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add the eggs, oil, milk, and water and fold them into the mix with a fork. Add mayonnaise, sour cream, and vanilla, and beat the mixture on low-speed. Add in the mint extract, and if the batter smells like plain chocolate instead of mint chocolate, add a bit more. Blend until the dry ingredients are no longer dry, and you have a consistent texture throughout.

Melt the 3 oz of chocolate in a double boiler then mix well into the batter.

Put cupcake papers into your cupcake pan. Pour batter into each cupcake paper, being as generous as you want. These raise decently but it’s always more fun if they come out as monster cupcakes.

Bake the cupcakes for 17 minutes, and test for doneness at any point after that. When a toothpick stuck in the middle of the biggest cupcake in the batch comes out clean, take them out of the oven and let them cool for a few minutes before removing from the cupcake pan.

Decorate as desired and enjoy 🙂

These are really amazing cupcakes. Perfectly moist and the mint chocolate is just irresistable. The kind of thing you can impress everyone with…if you can bear to part with any of them. 🙂