- Hey bakers John Kanell here and today on Preppy Kitchen we're making the ultimate chocolate cupcake or is this the ultimate chocolate cupcake? Too much frosting? You let me know. This stuff is so good you will be piping it
directly into your mouth. So either make a double batch of it or have someone keep an eye on you. Let's get started. I'm adding 180 grams or one and a half cups
of all purpose flour into a bowl with a swifter above it. One and a third cups of sugar. In you go half a teaspoon of salt and one teaspoon of baking soda,
that's our leavening agent. We're gonna sieve it up and whisk it out except that
I put out the cocoa powder that is like the main
flavor what I'm I thinking. Alright, put this back on. Let's get that cocoa I'm
adding one quarter cup of a high quality cocoa powder. This is from Valrhona, but there's tons of nice brands out there. Now we're gonna sift this lumpy mess out look at these boulders. Give it some help. All right, whisk it up take it off the scale if you wanna to be nice to your scale. Right, now that everything's distributed, we can set this aside and work on our wet ingredients
after a quick wipe down. This recipe calls for buttermilk but I never have buttermilk. It's just like annoying because it goes bad so quickly and you use it. I don't make buttermilk pancakes every day lemme just say that. So my solution is to use regular milk which we're gonna sour
with some white vinegar. You could also use lemon
juice if you want to. We just need to add some
acidity to curdle it and it will help with
the leavening agents too. So almost half a cup and then we're just gonna
pour in a tablespoon or so. Give it a little stir, stir, stir stir. By the time ready for it. It'll be nice and thick. Into my separate bowl I'm
adding in two whole eggs. A quarter of a cup of sour cream if you don't have sour
cream yogurt will do as well just use plain whole milk yogurt. A third of a cup of vegetable oil. I love this cake because
you can go into the fridge and still be like really, really soft and totally doesn't have to come back to room temperature. That's because of the vegetable oil, half a cup of our mock buttermilk. See all that curdle that
but it'll taste good. So I'm supposed to use hot coffee but this is cool down in the meantime while we were setting up, it's fine. The warmer coffee just
warms the mixture up a bit and kind of released the
flavor of the cocoa powder but it'll be fine. I'm also adding in a splash of vanilla to two teaspoons for good measure. totally optional though some
people are really bothered by vanilla going into chocolate things. You can lemme know in the comments if that's you or if you're fine with it. I like a little extra depth
of flavor going to stir it up. Never turned the oven on. Alright and once you have
a nice homogenous mixture, we can add the wet to the dry. This can be done in a standard mixer with a paddle attachment or it could be done by
hand which I'll be doing right now I just don't wanna
deal with another dish. Let's pour that in. This makes a very wet
batter, so don't be scared. If it looks too watery. That's how it's gonna to be
magic will happen in the oven, and it'll become a wonderful moist but still like fluffy fudgy cupcake. Doing this by hand means
I'm saving electricity and getting exercise I'm a hero. You wanna stir this for like you know a little bit less than a minute. You do wanna activate some
of the gluten in the flour. You'll see it become nice and silky and there won't
be any lumps left in there. Strangely mesmerizing
set nice drizzly bUtter. That's what we want, so
we're gonna set it aside and prep our little cupcake papers. Let's add papers into our 10 I'm using just plain old white ones. I like that you can see the chocolate come through the keys and the beats and not
overfill these they actually will rise a lot so don't go about two thirds of the way full. I'm using a medium ice cream scoop to help me out, yesterday
I used a large one. Horrible things happened, it was a full glom pan
of chocolate cupcake, but it looked like a sheet cake. So I'm gonna try be neat about this . This is harder when they're giant. By the way, they're trimming a giant 50 year old pine tree right next door right outside of the window. And in case you're wondering, what's that buzzing sound? It's chainsaws. Filling up those cupcakes,
they be eating my feelings. This recipe will make
about 16 to 18 cupcakes depending on how you're filling them. I have some leftover batter, so I'm just gonna spray
a little three inch pan and make a mega cupcake or personal cake for myself. cupcakes will go into the oven at 350 Fahrenheit for about 25 minutes or until the center's are springy and set. In the meantime, let's make our dreamy chocolate
Swiss meringue buttercream. We need five egg whites. So let's start separating. You can use a third
bowl to separate in two. If you're afraid your
yolks are gonna break like that one just did. If you're quick though,
it's not a big deal. I see some milk in there. Clean hands is the best way but make sure you crack those eggs carefully otherwise bad things are gonna happen. I should have used that third
bowl what was I thinking once again, trying to be a big shot. Now we're adding in a cup and a half of granulated sugar in you go. If you like your butter
cream a bit sweeter you could add in maybe
two extra tablespoons. At some point though those
eggs become saturated and the sugar won't dissolve into them. So you have little grains. And yes, I learned this the hard way. Give this a stir so it is fully homogenous add a pinch of salt in here too. And now we're gonna to put it
over a pot of simmering water making sure the water
does not touch the bowl. Its on steam heated to 160 degrees and yes, you will be
whisking this the whole time. Alright, so take your 160
degree Fahrenheit egg mixture and pour it right into
your standard mixer. You can see how gooey it is now. We're gonna mix on high
for about 10 minutes or so needs to come to room temperature. While that's going,
I'm adding in 10 ounces of bittersweet chocolate into a bowl. You can give this a shot if you want but I think it'll be fine just like this and we're gonna to place it
right over that double boiler and then you keep mixing by
the time they're both done. Everything will be set. Let's check in on this. Look, look how gorgeous this is this is like my one of my favorite parts of baking
in case you're wondering, making merengue. Okay, so it's not ready
yet cause it's too warm. But look at that. It's like a Dr. Seuss dollop. This needs to mix for a while longer, you could actually pack the bowl on ice to speed things
up but that chocolate has to melt the cupcakes have to bake so I'm not in a huge hurry. Once the chocolate starts melting, you can just give a little
stir to help things along and keep an eye on it. So my chocolate isn't all the way melted but I'm taking it off the heat and those couple extra lumps will just dissolve on their own. This needs to start
cooling down so you know, the sooner, the better. Alright, in the meantime, my merengue is almost cool enough and I'm gonna risk it. Look at this that's
ready so you can see how it has that nice little
moveable wobble over there. The thing is, if it's too warm, the butter will melt. This is actually nice in room temperature. But if you couldn't wait
and you plop that butter and it becomes soupy, just give it like five
minutes in the fridge. So just take the bowl off into the fridge and whip it up it should be fine. Right now we're gonna go on low and start adding in
tablespoon sized pieces of this room temperature butter. Butter needs to be nice
and room temp not melty. Add a tablespoon in, give
it a beat add the next one. This will take a minute or two
but it's really entertaining. I call this my wishing well time. You're gonna see this is gonna become soupy right away after that first half cup of butter goes in or 113 grams. I'm adding in one full pound, by the way. So 113 times four or, you know, two cups, or four sticks if you're in America. So sad that so many American recipes are not in metric because it's depriving all those people around the
world that don't use cups. I myself didn't know
that cups weren't a thing until I started my YouTube videos. I was educated quickly,
like what is the cup Take a look at this ,off. That's what I'm looking for nice has a lot of definition. This still needs to keep going for a bit cause there are some
little specks of butter in there but that is a nice
Swiss marine consistency you can see there I
think it tastes delicious even without the vanilla, but instead of vanilla today
we're adding chocolate. This is gonna mix for
a couple more minutes and then this is gonna
to keep cooling down. If it's still really warm, you can transfer it to a cold bowl, now will help things along as well. And this is pretty hot, so I am gonna transfer it to a cold bowl to help things along. You could have also done it
in advance which I did not do. Cupcakes have been
cooling in the background. They're not done yet, but look at this perfectly filled cupcake. It makes me so happy. Yesterday I overfilled the cupcakes and it was trying, there's a lot of sneak eating
happening on the slide. So my chocolates been in the
fridge for a couple of minutes and now it's in the 70s so it's perfectly fine to drizzle in wild as mixes on low. This is the magical part where
everything comes together, it's so pretty. So as you can see, the
inside is totally chocolatey, the outside is not mixed. So let's give it a mix
and scrape the bowl down. I mean that is just right. So much chocolate. Not too much sugar light is there. Okay, we're ready to transfer this amazing concoction into a piping bag. I'm fitting it with an 869 tip. It's my large open star my
favorite cupcake decorating tip especially if you wanna
add in a ton of frosting. So with this dollop I'm gonna
add a ton of butter cream to the bottom and keep
turning it clockwise counterclockwise until it
becomes a little point. That's pretty nice and it's maybe just the right amount of butter cream, love it. Let's make a couple more. So you could also just do one big dollop without the turning. It's kinda nice to spiral, you could just top it
with a chocolate covered espresso bean or maybe a
little drizzle of chocolate. Back to my favorite, I
think that looks so nice and it's really, really easy to do. By the way, if it's a bit off center, you can just tap it a little bit and it'll correct it. While it's still soft,
doesn't go into the fridge, but they'll really firm up so I would leave them at room
temperature just covered. So this is the actual amount of frosting that I like on a cupcake. I am not a crazy frosting
to cake ratio person I like it to be you know more cake than frosting in this time for a bite. Basically speechless all
the chocolate pathways in my brain are firing on full. You don't taste the coffee really just up to the chocolate flavor and this frosting is like the perfect companion to this fluffy fudgy cupcake. You've got to try this I don't know if you can tell how delicious this is, but I'm like I will be
gorging myself off camera. It's that good. If you like this recipe, check out my German chocolate cake. It has everything you need a German chocolate cake to be
and it is beyond amazing. Thanks so much for watching. If you like my videos, hit that like button and
subscribe and I'll see you soon
