Chocolate Spider Web Cupcakes

Cupcakes!?! Seriously, that is all you need to say to capture my attention. Whenever I see these heavenly little things, I secretly think, "mmm....CUUUUUPCAAAAAAKEEEEES!!!"  I will cut a bitch over a cupcake.  Imagine the power of the Hulk in the Avengers mixed with the excitement of Will Ferrell in the movie Elf right before he realized the department store Santa was a fake, and there you have it....cupcakes is serious business to me! The sad thing is, it's really hard to find a good cupcake in my town unless they are homemade. Our "specialty" bakeries that focus on them are not anything to brag about. Luckily, when I get to go see the BF in Wausau, WI, I get to hit up Sweet Lola's who has AMAZING and very creative cupcakes. (They have a Nutella one. Yeah, that's right, now I have you drooling.) All in all, though, we don't always have the time or energy to whip up a batch from scratch, and sometimes we feel a slight guilt about it. Nevertheless, you could also be one of those people where the idea of actually making cupcakes makes you giggle a bit inside as you relax with a glass of wine and a clean kitchen. In the end I have a recipe that works for everyone. It's a box mix with a little extra love added into it!

 Ingredients

1 cup of water
1 box of cake mix of your choice. As you can see, I quite obviously picked Betty Crocker's Chocolate Fudge
3 grade A large eggs
1 stick of non-salted butter
Cupcake wrappers
1 tub of white icing, found in any bakery area in your local grocery store

Melt the stick of butter in a large bowl.  Add the cake mix, eggs, and water.

Using a mixer, mix for one minute on low speed (or mix by hand until all batter is smooth). After that, blend the mixture for one minute on high (or find a big guy with muscles who can whip that up into a frenzy). You will see it start to fluff during the minute on high.






Now, in a cupcake pan, lay your cupcake wrappers down. Using either an ice cream scoop or melon baller, add your batter into the liners . If you have an ice cream scoop, do one scoop, for a melon baller, add three scoops. If you don't own either, use a spoon and fill them til they are half way full. (Don't feel bad if all you have is a spoon! That's all I had until I borrowed my friends melon baller. That thing sat in my purse for three days before I remembered to take I had it.) Bake the cupcakes at 350 for 10-20 minutes. Check with tooth pick to make sure cupcakes are done. To do this poke cupcake with a toothpick and once the toothpick comes out clean your cupcakes are done!

Once these are finished you should be seeing something along the lines of this. Those creases you are seeing are  because I had to do the three scoop option. If you have an ice cream scoop you wont be seeing those. But these puppies are going to have lovely frosting all on top of them so why do we care?


 Now, let's talk frosting. Feel free to just use store bought frosting if you want! But for me - I was trying to get these to taste as close to home made as possible. For the frosting I used Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate frosting recipe. I don't have a picture of the ingredients but I will set ya up nicely for this recipe.

Ingredients
One stick of butter
2/3 cups of cocoa (I used Hershey because it's what I had)
3 cups of powdered sugar
1/3 cup of milk
1 tsp of vanilla extract

 Put cocoa and butter into bowl and mix until creamy. Now take the powdered sugar and milk and add them into the bowl alternately, blending the whole time. Feel free to use extra milk if you need to. Once powdered sugar and milk aare completely mixed with the butter, add the cocoa and vanilla, and mix  well. Load this stuff onto your cupcakes and then use your tube of white icing/frosting to make the spider web look.