Chocolate Surprise Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Icing

I think I already mentioned I love surprises. Especially good food surprises (I thought I'd stipulate good in case anyone (I'm looking at you, Mr Cake) thought, say, hiding mushrooms in trifle was a good idea. That = bad food surprise).

These cupcakes hopefully fit the bill. They look like regular mini cupcakes with cream cheese icing. Then you pop one in your mouth and the flavour kind of explodes (again, in a good way!).

The cake recipe is a chocolate mud cake recipe my friend Angela gave me a few years ago. It's a mighty recipe and also pretty easy. The original recipe I have makes a pretty big cake so I divided it by four, which gave me exactly 48 mini cupcakes.

The recipe is a bit odd if you're used to normal cake recipes - you start off by putting chocolate, butter and sugar in a bowl and adding boiling water. It looks pretty gross to start with, as you can see, but eventually the butter and chocolate melt and you get a delicious looking chocolatey soup.

Mmmm... Then you dump all the dry ingredients in:

(obviously I wasn't focussed on precision placement of ingredients at this point)

Then you divide it up into cupcake cases...

And then... Add the surprise!

Raspberries! These are just frozen ones from the supermarket (sad as I am I have to concede that summer is over) but they are like magic when the cupcakes are cooked. They do look a bit messy when they're cooked:

But if you make a huge bowl of cream cheese icing:

Well, that covers a multitude of sins. ;-) (and tastes delicious). My colleagues enjoyed these today - I had promised someone some baking to thank them for going out of their way to help me at work and I think they were a pretty effective bribe.

Chocolate Surprise Mini Cupcakes (makes 48 mini cupcakes)

Ingredients
80g white sugar
125g butter, cut into chunks
125g milk or dark chocolate chips
180ml boiling water
80g flour
20g cocoa
7g baking powder
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
48 raspberries (frozen or fresh)


Method
Preheat oven to 160 degrees celcius. Line mini cupcake pans with liners.

Put sugar, butter and chocolate chips into a bowl, and pour the boiling water over the top. Stir to melt and combine all ingredients. When you have a chocolatey soup, add all the remaining ingredients, and beat until smooth.

Divide the batter into the cupcake liners - one tablespoon full of batter should be about right. Push a raspberry into the centre of each cupcake.

Bake for 7-10 minutes. To check if they're done make sure they don't wobble too much - but they won't be firm as the cake doesn't firm up till it's cooled.

Cream Cheese Icing
Beat together 125g of cream cheese and 50g of butter until smooth. Add icing sugar until it holds its shape - about 1 1/2 cups but pay more attention to your icing than my measurements. ;-) Add 1 tsp of vanilla, beat well, then pipe or dollop on top of the cooled cupcakes - cover the raspberry completely for the best surprise.

Do you like surprises like this or do you want to know what's going in your mouth before you eat it?