These cupcakes give me that nostalgic feeling, as a child I used to love making peppermint creams – so simple and yummy. The icing on these cupcakes is just delicious! And the vibrant green colouring really goes hand in hand with the unforgettable flavour. The fun thing about making cupcakes is that you can always play around with how you’d like to decorate them, so be creative and have fun!

This post has been done for the  Cupcake creative competition by Range Cookers! See the competition details here.

Recipe

Servings: 12  Prep Time: 10mins Cooking Time: 20-25minsType: Cakes  Difficulty: Medium

Ingredients

• 200g/4oz Butter
• 200g/4oz Sugar
• 2 Eggs
• 175g/3oz Self Raising Flour
• 25g/1oz Cocoa Powder
• 50g/1oz Chocolate Chips

For the Icing:

• 300g/10oz Butter, Soften
• 750g/1lb 11oz Icing Sugar
• 2 drops Peppermint Extract
• 1 drop Mint Green Colouring (I use Sugarflair colouring)

1. Preheat the oven to 180oc, gas mark 4 and prepare your bun tin with cake cases.

2. Start by mixing your butter and sugar together until paler in colour and fluffy in texture.

3. Add one egg and little bit of flour and carefully mix together. Once smoothly combined, add the following egg and again a little bit of flour. By adding the eggs nice and slowly with a little flour it will prevent your mixture from splitting.

4. Once both of the eggs are nicely mixed in, add the rest of your flour, cocoa powder and mix.

5. Add the chocolate chips, like in my other recipes, I don’t generally go out of my way to buy chocolate chips, I find just coarsely chopping up a chocolate bar works just as well. If you find your mixture to be a little stiff just add a splash of milk.

6. Now your mixture is ready to divide into your cake cases. To get the perfect balance between all cupcakes many people use an ice cream scoop. Bake your cupcakes for around 20-25 mins, keep an eye on them. If your unsure if there ready just prick them with a folk, if there cooked then no mixture will stick to the folk 🙂

7. Let them cool down and then you can start the fun part :). To make your icing start by putting your soft butter in a bowl. I add the icing sugar slowly, roughly around a 100g at a time and I sift it in the butter to make sure its nice and smooth.

8. Once its all been added, add your flavouring and colouring, give it a mix and your ready to decorate. This part is really up to you how you like to decorate, you can pipe, use a spoon to spread the icing, add chocolate curls (by grating up a little chocolate), add sprinkles. The choice is yours! 🙂