I love Bakerella’s site. Love love love it. She has so much patience and creativity, and she creates the most deliciously decadent cookies.
I also love s’mores. And ever since I convinced Husband to use the fireplace, and we had our first successful fire, I have been craving them.
So when Bakeralla posted her recipe for S’more Cupcakes, I knew I had to make them, which I finally did on Monday night. I made several fatal errors, the first of which was thinking that I could successfully tinker with the recipe.
Here you see the lovely golden graham batter, with a sprinkling of graham crumb. Doesn’t it look good? The mistakes here are that I didn’t quite measure how much ground graham cracker I dumped into the batter. I suspect I put in a little too much. I also did a white flour: wheat flour 2:1 mix, but I think my only flour mistake was not adding more to account for more graham cracker in the batter. I also might have put a little too much crumb on top of this layer; my crumb was very buttery, likely due to, again, not measuring my ground graham cracker.
Then when I added the half marshmallow, and covered it with the chocolate batter, it still looked good. Another mistake: I used dark cocoa powder, because that is what I had on hand. The recipe calls for A LOT of cocoa powder, and in my experience dark cocoa powder is BITTER, so I added some more sugar to the chocolate batter. I eyeballed it, and I suspect that I should have added some more flour.
Here is a lovely smiling cupcake straight from the oven! Mistake: I always burn things cooked in my dark muffin tin. Always. Don’t buy dark metal baking tins: they look nicer and don’t stain as much as lighter ones, but they really mess up your baking times. Anyway, I underbaked my cupcakes, worried they would burn if I left them in too long. In my defense, the marshmallow was practically bubbling, and even Bakerella said her cupcakes spilled over in the oven.
The result was that my cupcakes slowly started to cave. The marshmallow goodness disappeared into the cakey bits, and they were definitely concave within five minutes. When I brought them in for my coworkers, I called them S’more Cups, because that is how concave they were. I also recommended that they eat them straight from the cups with a fork, because they were so crumby, probably because I didn’t include enough flour.
I think my final mistake was the use of silicone baking cups. I have a bunch of these, and I love them in theory: they are reusable, pretty, and sturdy. But in reality, I don’t think my muffins and cupcakes rise as well in them, sort of how you need to use paper to get a souffle or top heavy pastry to rise properly. The second batch I baked without cups, and I can’t get them out of my pan in one piece, because: not enough flour.
At any rate, these cupcakes were mad delicious and moist. I ate one at lunch yesterday, and then I had such a downer of a day that when I got home I ate another one straight from the pan. Literally, I sat on my couch with a tin full of chocolate cupcakes, dipping my fork in and chowing down. My husband gave me a dirty look, but it was worth it.