Over the last few years, I’ve gotten tired of cupcakes. Appearing everywhere, usually both dry and sickly sweet. I didn’t plan to do a cupcake recipe for this column, but after making these I just had to share them. They are like a giant Jaffa, but slightly larger and in cake form. The chocolate cake is rich, soft and chocolatey, but with a distinctive orange fragrance. The cake is so nice, in fact, that it would be totally fine without any icing – something you can’t say about many cupcakes. The icing, however, adds a further orange touch. If you want to play up the Jaffa idea, you can add red food colouring to it.
Chocolate Orange Cupcakes (makes 24 mini ones)
For the cupcakes:
1½ cups flour
1 cup white sugar
⅔ cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ cup oil
½ cup milk
1 egg
juice of one small orange (about ⅓ cup)
zest of one small orange
Preheat oven to 180 °C. Mix all ingredients together until smooth. Fill mini muffin tins with small cupcake wrappers, and spoon mixture into them (about ⅔ full). Bake until cooked (about 10 minutes). When cool, spread with icing.
For icing:
1¼ cups icing sugar
⅓ cup butter
zest of one small orange
juice of one small orange
Mix the icing sugar, zest and butter together. Add the juice slowly until the desired consistency is reached (you might not need all the juice). This makes enough icing for a light coating; if you want to pipe large amounts of icing, increase the recipe.