Moccachino cupcakes

Yesterday I wrote about recipes from Dish magazine. Today my recipe comes from the latest issue of Taste magazine. I subscribe to three magazines – Dish, Taste and Cuisine. Taste is probably my least favourite, but I still keep subscribing to it as I don’t like to miss out!! The recipes in taste are a lot more basic than in the other two magazines and are more what I think of as every day recipes. I don’t tend to make nearly as many recipes from Taste as I do from Dish and Cuisine (especially Dish).

This month I was excited to see that one of my favourite food writers, Julie Le Clerc is now doing a monthly column for Taste. I have all of Julie le Clerc’s books and attended many of her classes when she taught occasionally at the Epicurean cook school. Julie is a fabulous baker, and her recipes in her first column for Taste were part of a baking special. All of the recipes caught my eye, but I made the recipe for moccachino cake last weekend when we had our neighbours in to have a look at our new house. Instead of making one big cake, I halved the recipe and made cupcakes.

This recipe was so easy. It was basically a melt and mix recipe, but the cake was still lovely and light, not heavy like some melt and mix cakes are. The cake didn’t have a really pronounced coffee flavour, but the chocolate wasn’t so strong that it out weighed the coffeness – it was actually a well balanced cake. The cakes were iced with a coffee buttercream icing and I put the little silver dragees on top, but chocolate coated coffee beans would have been quite appropriate.

These cakes are definitely worth trying!

Moccachino Cupcakes (adapted from a Julie Le Clerc recipe in Taste magazine)

1/3 c rice bran oil
1 tbsp instant coffee
1/3 c boiling water
50g dark chocolate
½ c & 2 tbsp sugar
¼ c cocoa
1 egg
½ c & 2 tbsp flour
1 tsp baking powder
¼ c yoghurt

• Mix oil, coffee, boiling water and chocolate in a small saucepan and then warm over a gentle heat until the chocolate has melted
• Stir in the sugar and cocoa, until the sugar has dissolved. Leave to cool
• Stir in the egg (lightly beaten) then the flour and baking powder and lastly the yoghurt
• Spoon into cupcake cases and bake at 170c for 20-25 minutes
• When cold ice with buttercream icing made with 50 g butter, 1 ½ c icing sugar, 1 tsp vanilla and 2 tbsp hot strong coffee