Vanilla Cupcakes with Chocolate Frosting

I baked a batch of cupcakes for a potluck dinner. The recipe was taken from The Australian Women's Weekly Cook.

To soften the butter, I suggest walking to your supermarket and purchase the butter, when you're home, it'll be already nice and soft! as for the eggs, take them out of the fridge before leaving for the supermarket, I've read somewhere that room temperature eggs are best for cakes. Also, I didn't have caster sugar in my pantry, but only white sugar, which is not as fine as the caster. I just gave the batter a good mix to make sure all the sugar has been dissolved.

The vanilla cakes is so simple yet delicious with a wonderful egg aroma! good enough to eat it on its own. I thought the butter cream wasn't chocolatey enough, so I added in more cocoa but cut down on sugar. The cream turned out, well.. not so creamy but still very flavourful.

Don't freak out if you're butter cream hardens after a day or two, just pop them in the microwave for 8 seconds, and they'll be as good as being just out of the oven! ;)

enjoy!

Makes 24 cupcakes

For the cake, you'll need:

125g butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla essence

2/3 cup (150g) caster sugar

3 eggs

1 1/2 (225g) cups self raising flour

1/4 cup milk

Chocolate Butter Cream:

125g butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 ½ (240g) cups icing sugar

2 tbspn milk

1 tbspn cocoa powder

1. Preheat oven to 180˚C or 160˚C fan-forced. Line 2 12-hole patty pans with paper cases

2. Combine ingredients in small bowl of electric mixer; beat on low speed until ingredients are just combined. Increase to medium; beat about 3 minutes or until mixture is smooth and changed to paler colour.

3. Drop slightly rounded tablespoons of mixture in paper cases. Bake, uncovered, 20 minutes.

Chocolate Butter Cream

1. Beat butter and extract in a small bowl with electric mixer until as white as possible.

2. Gradually beat in half the sifted icing sugar, cocoa powder, milk, then remaining icing sugar.