I’d never made cupcakes before, but I love the concept of little decorated cakes. Aren’t these cute? Next time I’m going to go for a slightly more adult colour – a deep red, or purple. I got the inspiration for this recipe from this, but changed the recipe to cater to the ingredients I had available. I think any good chocolate cake recipe would work well, though.

1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup cocoa
2 teaspoons baking soda
1-1/2 cups milk

for the icing:
1/2 cup softened butter
4 cups icing sugar
roughly 1/4 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Cream the butter and sugar together. Beat in the vanilla, eggs and milk until you have a nicely smooth mixture. In fact, the original recipe was done entirely in a food processor, but I couldn’t be bothered getting mine out and then washing it up.

Gradually add the flour, cocoa and baking soda, stirring throughout to remove lumps.

Place paper patty cake cases into two muffin tins, and put about 2 big dessert spoonfuls of mixture in each one – this made about 18 cupcakes. Bake for about 30 minutes.

For the icing, begin beating together the softened butter and icing sugar, gradually adding milk as you go along. Stop adding milk when you get a fairly stiff texture – I made my icing a bit soft, and instead of defined swirls of icing (which was what I was aiming for) it all collapsed into a smooth topping.

These were delicious – extremely sweet, and very cute.