Thursday, September 18, 2008

Organic Chocolate Marshmallow Cream Cupcakes

Vive les cupcakes! These darlings are my contribution to Sugar High Friday and are inspired by sweet Miss Fanny over at foodbeam who posted the deadly delicious and "so horribly fluffy" s'mores cupcakes last week. My version is made from 100% organic ingredients (and fair trade sugar and espresso) and it also takes a tiny shortcut by putting the chocolate into the lovely little cakes themselves (along with a few other mini-tweaks) but I still slathered on the wonderful marshmallow cream.

Preheat oven to 170°C. For twelve smallish normal cupcakes, first mix 150 g flour, 10 g really good dark cocoa powder, 1/2 tsp good sea salt (less than fanny's recipe since I used lightly salted butter), and 1 1/4 tsp baking powder in a bowl.

In another bowl cream 60 g butter with 85 g raw sugar, then beat in one egg plus one egg yolk (left over from separating the white for the marshmallow cream), a dash of vanilla, a couple tsp good espresso to deepen the chocolate flavour and 160 g milk. Now mix in the flour mixture until just combined, fill your buttered cupcake tin or paper cups and bake for 15 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

While the cupcakes bake and cool, make your marshmallow cream - for this I followed Fanny's recipe to the letter except that I used raw sugar instead of caster sugar. Beat one egg white with a pinch of salt to soft peak stage. Leave them for a moment and in a saucepan, bring the 2 tbsp water and 75 g raw sugar to a boil and let it reach 115°C. Now continue to beat the egg white while slowly pouring in the sugar syrup and keep going until the bowl starts to cool to the touch, watching with delight as the mixture becomes glossy and gooey and wonderful. Spoon a good dollop onto each little cupcake and smooth to the edges with a spatula.

Thankyou Fanny for the tastiest, easiest recipe for marshmallow cream ever. I just love finding homemade solutions for things you typically have to buy and now I will never buy marshmallows again - this is going to top my hot cocoa forever more. Bon appétit my friends!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

yum!

Anonymous said...

ohh yum! that marshmallow cream looks delish!!!

sara angel said...

beautiful!

Anonymous said...

This looks absolutely fabulous! I love the marshmallow creme.

Laurel Williams said...

Thanks for the compliments and do try it! The marshmallow fluff was so impertinently easy to make and next time I am making a double batch just to keep in a jar in the fridge for emergency marshmallow cravings...

Maggie said...

I love the easy, small batch of marshmallow cream! Thanks for sharing that recipe.

Anonymous said...

can i ask what is raw sugar? do you mean brown sugar (fine brown sugar, slightly sticky) ?

:-)

Vidhya said...

Thats yummy.

Laurel Williams said...

Raw sugar is an unrefined and natural tan, coarse sugar made from sugar cane. It has less environmental impact than white or common brown sugar and it is even a little bit healthier for us since it doesn't require harmful chemicals to produce it, it still contains trace minerals and, I have found, that I can use a little less of it since it has such a rich molasses/brown sugary flavor to it. Demerara and Turbinado are two kind of raw sugar that you can use. I hope you find this helpful.

Anonymous said...

For some of those of us that are a bit domestically challenged at times these even sound like something I could make. They do look yummy.