Baking up a storm (or, how I almost ruined three consecutive batches of cupcakes) Part I

Topher* has become obsessed with stumble upon.  You know, that interweb service that has you enter things you like (such as baking, cute animals and fart jokes- all of which, I'm pretty sure, Topher has listed) and then it has you "stumble" across websites that align with your interests.  Luckily, that baking interest is mostly for me, which is how he found perhaps the most amazing recipe for a chocolate concoction involving brownies, fudgey amazing icing and very dense chocolate cake. I've loved this website for free fonts (I used one for our wedding invitation envelopes!) but had no idea of the amazing baking recipes that awaited me.

One of my favorite co-worker's birthday was last week, and she's allergic to nuts.  For some reason, sweets people bring into the office always have nuts- so I promised to make her a delicious, amazing, chocolate filled dessert with NO nuts!  That's where these cupcakes come in handy!

Now, these chocolate cupcakes with brownies in the middle were delicious.  Even when I f-ed it up the first time and forgot a crucial ingredient.  This dense cake recipe is actually pretty simple, involving a devil's food cake mix and a box of pudding mix- and, strangely enough, still tastes pretty good when you forget the pudding mix.  Yeppers, that'd be attempt number 1 where I nearly failed at these amazing cupcakes.

Topher had Veteran's Day off of work, so he did the first step for me.  You create the brownie batter and freeze them in little balls over night.

This dough is VERY viscous and thick- it's hard to coax it into somewhat good looking balls.

 

Once we completed this step, I created the infamous forgotten ingredient cake batter.  After spooning these into muffin pans, we dropped the frozen brownie bites into the middle of the cupcakes: (there are much better pictures of this for round two, below)

I'm sure you can guess- especially if you are a baker- but forgetting the pudding mix wreaked a bit of havoc on the structural integrity of the cupcakes.  I realized five minutes into the first batch cooking that I'd forgotten the pudding mix, and spent the remaining ten minutes sitting on the floor of the kitchen, watching them bake.  Topher sat with me, trying to console me.

And...they sank. Like woah.  They became crater cupcakes.  Not so much "brownie surprise" as "brownie sank." Awesome.

I refused to give up though, and made the amazing frosting. Again, here I more than softened the butter and it took a few minutes for it to thicken up from this liquidy mess:

I lamented over my crater cupcakes:

Eventually, the frosting had matured enough to be piped:

I definitely cut my ziploc bag a bit too thin and these ended up looking like piles of doggy poo on top:

But they were delicious!  Even the healthiest of eaters at work gave in to these and I had three emails and a voicemail telling me how much they loved them- so if you're looking to make friends at work, make these!  But wait until part two so I can show how these should really be made!

Guess what Boomer did throughout this debacle? Chewed on her new comfy bed and avoided my camera.  Biotch.

There were too many photos for just one post, so I'll put up part two (where I nearly screw up the frosting, but make the cupcakes correctly) tomorrow!

*I began this post as Toph and I drove home from the Caps game on Sunday and after I read him the title, his first words were "I better get a lot of nods in that one!"  I had already composed the first sentence, so HA on him.  I think my blogging has gone too far when the hubs feels entitled to appear in the posts...