Cakey Bakey: Choc Chip Cupcakes with Fudge Frosting

It's national chocolate week! So to celebrate I made the most chocolatey cupcakes in existence. Be warned - these are not for people who utter that insane phrase 'Oh, it's far too chocolatey for me...' Personally I can't understand that - I have never tasted anything that is 'too' chocolatey. There is no such thing! You crazies.

But for those of you who appreciate chocolate, these are for you. Use GOOD quality chopped chocolate or choc chips, the darker the better. Dark dark dark.

Fairly simple, it's just the frosting that can take a while - I so nearly ate all the cupcakes before I'd even put the frosting on!

This recipe is from the amazing book by Elinor Klivans - The Essential Chocolate Chip Cookbook. Buy it from amazon. It's full of recipes all about chocolate chips - there's some brilliant cookie recipes in there. Do it now.

Here's one I ate earlier.

Hopefully this will be up on Recipe Look later, as I'll email it in.

For my apple & cinnamon muffin recipe, click here.

For all my posts about recipes, including my illustrated recipe book, click here.

These illustrations are mine, no nicking without asking!

Recipe Look

I was told about this site aaages ago by Tom, the creator of Recipe Look, when he commented on an old post about my illustrated recipe book.

I then went 'that's a really great idea for a site!' in my head, and then... didn't do a lot about it. But my illustration yesterday about the muffins I made reminded me about it, and when I had a little look again, it's going really strong.

Here's what it's all about:

"Are you fed up with normal recipes and their pesky, text based formats? Do you want to see some life breathed in to your lunchbox inspiration, some spectacle in your spatchcock chicken? Recipe Look is here to save you supper time. It’s packed with interesting food ideas and they’re all drawn out by hand, so you can easilt see what you have to do. What’s more, you have the chance to make your own ‘recipe look’ and send it in to us. We’ll simply make it the right size and stick it on the site; you’ll be famous in minutes!"

Which I think is a great idea - I do love food illustration and illustrated recipes and it's really inspiring to see loads of recipes submitted from all over, as well as how people are drawing them - the idea is to use the least amount of words as possible so the recipe comes across purely in the drawing.

This is the most recent one from the site, sent in by orboc:

So that's the basic idea. I'm going to email the muffin recipe in so you might see it up there soon.

It would be nice to have coloured/arranged the recipe in Illustrator as doing something hand drawn never comes out exactly the way you wanted it to. But I am still Mac-less and have only MS Paint at my disposal. Yeah... not ideal.

Soon. Hopefully. Probably not :(