Chocolate Cupcakes

The Chocolate Brownie Cake I made a few weeks ago yielded a large amount of leftover ganache, leaving me with a few options: throw it away, bake a matching cake, or pass it off to a certain male sibling to eat. The first option was out of the question and hey, any excuse to make a cake, right? Out came the trusty Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake reipe and into the oven went twenty-four cupcakes in brightly coloured cupcakes cases.
What came out of the oven was a sight which can only really be described as hideous. The last time I made this cake, while not affecting the taste in any way, it did sink in just a tiny bit, and the same thing happened to many of these cupcakes. Far from the lovely, domed cupcakes which are ideal, these were some of the ugliest cupcakes I had ever seen. Needless to say, I was sent into the infamous panic mode I adopt during the creation of almost everything I bake. Twenty four cupcakes isn't exactly a number that you can just throw away, so it was all up to the icing to fix things. Luckily, (cupcake) justice prevailed and the cupcakes proved to be nothing that a good dollop of ganache couldn't fix.
I thought that the original recipe would not make enough cupcakes, so I mentally calculated the amounts of the ingredients and used the equivalent of one and a half batches worth of ingredients. They tasted delicious in the end and I comtemplated for a brief second as to why I didn't do four unit maths. Mentally calculating cupcake ratios surely qualifies me for that kind of stuff, no?
Ahem anyways.

As a result of this, I'm not entirely sure how many just one regular quantity will make, but eh, you can figure it out on your own :P. The recipe is exactly the same as the one I have blogged before, just in cupcake form. They will more like likely end up hideous, so be sure to apply generous amounts of ganache.

Oh and just a side note, I wasn't able to cook with eggs that day so I had to use egg replacement powder. That stuff is actually pretty awesome in cakes, just as good as real eggs and particularly helps cakes stay moist. :)
 
(Adapted from Nigella Lawson's Old-Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe)

For the cake: 

• 200g plain flour
• 200g caster sugar
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 40g cocoa
• 175g soft unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla essence (use extract if you have it)
• 150 mL sour cream

For the ganache: 

• 75g unsalted butter
•  175g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
•  300g icing sugar
• 125mL sour cream
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

1.  Preheat oven to 180 degrees and line a muffin tray with patty cases.
2. Put everything into a food processor and blitz until you have a smooth, thick batter. (Seriously, that's it. I usually get scared that the batter is too thick, so i splash in a bit of milk while I'm blitzing it).
3.  Bake for around 20 minutes or when until a skewer inserted into the cupcakes comes out clean.
4. Allow cupcakes to cool for five minutes in the muffin tin before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
5. When  cakes are completely cool, prepare the ganache. Melt the chocolate and butter together by placing them in a bowl over a pot of barely simmering water, stirring occasionally.
6. When the mixture has finished melting, sift the icing sugar  into a small bowl while the chocolate mixture cools. Add the sour cream and vanilla and then the icing sugar into the chocolate mixture, whisking while the icing sugar is added to prouduce a silky smooth concoction.
7. Frost the cupcakes. Yay.

Edit: I just realised that almost every post on here has been about a chocolate recipe, with many consecutive ones in the past few weeks. Unfortunately, I can't break that with my next post, but I am hoping to do so after that!