recipe: orange chocolate cupcakes

Okay, so John and I do eat other things besides dessert. Really, we do! I just seem to blog about the dessert recipes a lot more often.

I found the link to the recipe for these on OnePrettyThing, a blog that compiles bunches of crafting/decorating ideas from all sorts of other blogs each day. It's a fun place to go every now and then, and I've found some great ideas there!

These cupcakes are delicious. Simple to make, too. The recipe is really just a glorified cake mix, but it tastes soooooooooo good! You could also easily take your favorite chocolate cake recipe and customize it using orange juice and zest if you'd rather not use a mix.

John and I agree, though, that the best part of these is the icing. It's a basic buttercream recipe, but the liquid is orange juice instead of milk and there is about an orange worth of zest in it. Just delicious, and not cloyingly sweet the way buttercream can sometimes be.

1 Box Chocolate Cake Mix
Replace Water with Orange Juice
1/2 Orange Zested
Follow box directions with the added and replaced ingredients. For parchment cupcake papers (for the mini cupcakes that she showed on her blog - I made regular sized cupcakes with regular papers) cut 3 1/4” squares and squish down into cupcake pan.

Icing
4 Cups Powdered Sugar
8 Tablespoons Butter, Softened
3 Tablespoons Orange Juice (add more juice if needed)
1 Orange Zested
Mix all the ingredients until smooth. Use a round piping tip to pipe the icing (I used a plastic sandwich baggy with a corner cut off). Zest an additional orange for garnish and sprinkle a little sugar on top.

If you have a chance to take a look at her blog, I recommend it! She's a graphic designer at Hume Lake and her work is sweet and refreshing