Black bottom Orange cupcakes

I have this urge to just fill this line with smileys. These cupcakes are like my first creations!

I'm always thinking of new stuff to make, but this is one of the rare times where I decided to just bake and see instead of theorising whether it will be a flop.

Essentially, I made a firm chocolate dough and pressed it down at the bottom, then baked it for 5 minutes before plopping the orange batter in.

Orange-speckled beauties. The zesty orange flavour didn't come through as strongly as I hoped, perhaps adding orange essence or a dash of Cointreau might help..

You can dress them up easily by making orange flavoured icing with orange juice. After shaping the cookies for baking I was so tired that all I wanted was to lie down and close my eyes.

So they are just plain ol' cupcakes sitting snugly together now.

The cookie dough left over can be easily rolled out and shaped. Testimony to this: Look at how teeny-weeny those alphabets are!

You counting the times LOVE is repeated?

As you can see, I'm very very happy with today.

Which is quite contradictory to how today started: With me waking up so early, travelling so far to end up walking through the school gate to discover that there was NO school.







Which shows me yet again that you shouldn't let one bad thing screw up your entire day. To be honest the anxiety-prone part of me was going on overdrive till I decided that I must make max out today.

Which led to me having a really great day eating dim sum with grandma, shopping for baking stuff and baking for the entire afternoon.

Which ended up with me hunched in front of the computer typing this post.  (okay I should end this now)


Black bottom orange cupcakes                                         Makes 24 cupcakes

Cookie dough:
100g unsalted butter, softened
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 t vanilla extract
2 T milk
1 1/4 cup AP flour
2 T cocoa powder

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

Beat butter, sugar, extract and milk until light and fluffy.

Add flour and cocoa powder and mix to form a firm dough. Knead it until smooth; cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Line cupcake pan (24 cupcake cases); then press slightly more than 1 teaspoon of dough at the bottom.

Bake for 5 minutes.

Adapted from 'easy baking' by The Australian Women's Weekly

Orange batter
150g unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
finely grated zest of 1 orange
juice of half an orange
2 eggs, separated
1/4 cup milk
3/4 cup AP flour
1 1/2 t baking powder

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C.

Beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Incorporate the orange zest and egg yolks, then the milk and orange juice. (You might want to have multiple additions of the juice to ensure the batter is not too watery)

Sift drt ingredients, then fold them a third at a time into the butter mixture.

Whisk egg whites until stiff, then fold in 2 goes into the cake mixture, as lightly as possible.

Fill the cases with about a heaped tablespoon of batter, and bake for 20 minutes, until lightly browned and a skewer inserted comes out clean.

Adapted from 'gorgeous cakes' by Annie Bell
Notes:

* To make orange icing, juice the other half and add about 6 T of icing sugar (and a drop of orange colouring if you wish), mixing well after each tablespoon is added to make a thick mixture.