Baking Frenzy!

I'm still designing products for the new website so I've been baking lots of different things so I can take photos for the product images. Yesterday I couldn't make up my mind which flavours to try out, the choice was between sticky toffee, chocolate orange and mint choc chip. Being a woman and hormonal, I kept dithering and ended up baking all three flavours!

This is the chocolate orange cupcake, I just adapted my usual rich chocolate recipe by adding fresh orange zest and juice, same with the icing:

I'm not a fan of chocolate orange personally but I must admit this one was good!

Next I tried the mint choc chip, I've always been a bit dubious about this flavour as I kinda thought it would be a bit like cake smeared with toothpaste, so I decided to really up the chocolate content by adding choc chips to the cake as well as using them as a topping. And it worked, really pleased with how they came out :)

Finally it was time to experiment with sticky toffee. When I make this as a pudding, it always goes down a storm so I was hoping it would work well in cupcake form. I used my usual trusty recipe for a moist toffee flavour sponge, when cooled I scooped a bit of cake from the top of each one and filled it with a gooey toffee sauce (after I'd tested it a few times, naturally!) To finish off, I piped on a small amount of buttercream as I didn't want to overdo the sweetness and scattered a few mini fudge chunks on top.

The sticky toffee was so yummy although next time I think I would make the sauce thicker as it did kind of sink into the cake, still fabulous though!