If you, like myself and my daughter, are choc-a-holics, then a chocolate cake is likely your go-to cake of choice. Turning this into cupcake-format means that there is an imposed portion limit, which, at least in my case, is welcome!

And so Alice and I did a collaborative chocolate cupcake bake this morning. The recipe we used was based on the vanilla cupcake recipe which I developed a couple of months ago, but with 10g of the flour substituted for cocoa powder. It turns out that this was perhaps not the best decision, as the batter mix pre-baking had the consistency of a custard; I had to ladle it into the cases rather than spoon it in! Despite this however, the texture after baking was actually quite pleasant. None-the-less, in terms of improvement, of which there is always room for, I would stick to the same volume of flour, and add the cocoa powder as an extra dry ingredient.

We iced our cupcakes with diabetic-friendly vanilla butter cream icing, made with a sugar-substitute. In the interests of aligning my diabetic baking with my cupcakecrush venture of providing self-decoration cupcakes for events, I tried different piping patterns using piping bags with various different scissor cuts in the end of them, rather than using a traditional nozzle. Unfortunately, what I didn’t really realise until I stood back and had a proper look at them, was that the colour of my icing makes it look uncannily like mashed potato (once you see it, you can’t unsee it!). But despite this, we still had fun messing around with it, and I must say, it was rather more tricky to do non-nozzle icing with the diabetic-icing than with the sugar-full icing, as the diabetic-version is rather more sticky; it would rather stick to itself/the outside of the piping bag/a finger than to the cake top!

None-the-less, we had a great time making, baking, and decorating our diabetic-friendly chocolate cupcakes, and then of course, eating them!!