Chocolate Malt Cupcakes

So, cupcakes: I’m at a loss as to why I had a bee in my bonnet to whip up a batch. I don’t think I’d ever actually made cupcakes before, which is a touch odd when you consider my willingness to tackle layer cake on a semi-regular basis.

I lifted this recipe (making only minor changes) from Culinary Concoctions by Peabody. In the pros side, we have excellent chocolate and malt flavors and luscious, light-textured frosting. In the cons side, we have the fact that the frosting didn’t yield quite enough for all the cupcakes – which was my fault in a way for being generous in its application, perhaps, but I think of a cupcake as primarily a small frosting vehicle, so recipes should be written accordingly – and the fact that, while flavorful, the whipped cream-based frosting doesn’t bear up to extended time in the fridge as well as a traditional buttercream would have.

This was only a problem because this recipe makes 18-24 cupcakes (depending on how full you fill the tins). I was hoping for only a dozen and presumed that was the standard quantity for cupcake recipes. Live and learn, eh?