Cupcake AIBU

[AprilMayJuneJuly]

I’m taking part in a bake-off at work, and have been asked to make cupcakes.

I’m keen to make chocolate cupcakes, but maybe with another complementary flavour - for example, chocolate with orange or chocolate with caramel. I’d prefer not to use nuts as some of my colleagues are allergic.

I’d also like to try and make a filling for each of the cakes, like a sort of gooey, molten centre. What do you all think? I was thinking of either making a gooey caramel centre, a chocolate ganache centre or maybe an orange centre (with marmalade or something, but I’m a bit less convinced that it’ll be tasty).

Apart from my shameless pleas for asking you what flavour you’d go for and if you’d go for a soft centre, please can I ask how I can make the cupcakes moist and worthy of a Paul Hollywood handshake on the real Bake Off? How do you get a really tasty, more-ish cake? I’ll definitely do a few practice bakes as I haven’t made cupcakes in years!

I’m not too keen on having a gooey centre personally. Means there’s way too much icing/wet to cake ratio. That’s my personal preference though.

I volunteer to test them, OP.

Nigella's old fashioned chocolate cake makes great buns.

Thanks so much for your replies, everyone!

I think my main concern is how I can make them look impressive, as they’ll be judged (anonymously) by my colleagues by my work. I thought that a Black Forest-themed cupcake would look amazing and taste really nice, but so much of it also depends on people’s personal preferences, of course.

I don’t want to make the cupcakes too fiddly and complicated (it would be a huge amount of work and they may not even taste that nice), but I also want them to look impressive. What to do??

Marble icing? A swirl of bright orange and chocolate icings mixed together?

You can either cut out a hole in the top middle of your cupcake (nimagine making a butterfly cake but a deeper hole) putbypur caramel or whatever in the hole, cut the chunk of cake you cut out in half and fill up the hole. When you put the buttercream/ganache on the top of the cake you will never know.
Or, as other people have suggested , use a thin piping attachment to a bag and pipe it into the middle. You may have to ‘ slacken’ what ever you are piping in though if it is a very thick mixture.

If you have an Aldi nearby, get their chocolate cake mix - just add oil and water. It makes about 18 delicious moist cupcakes.

You can add things like fudge pieces into the mix, but it doesn't like wetter ingredients like marmalade.

I'd do a chocolate cupcake with orange buttercream and top with a terrys (Aldis) choc orange segment.

Get a Wilton 1M tip - makes a large buttercream swirl and looks impressive. I always get people admiring my cupcakes just because of the fancy swirls

Shameless place marking

Raspberry with a white chocolate centre

Victoria sponge cupcake with fresh cream inside

Or seasonal, I seen a gorgeous cookie with a Reese's cup on top and chocolate sauce as spiders legs!