Coca Cola Cupcakes

Oh dear. I'm sorry. Again. I could just pretend that I loved Kalyn's cottage cheese and egg breakfast muffins so much that I wanted to share them with you for a whole week, but that wouldn't be truthful (although they are that good). I have no idea where the time goes sometimes, the weeks seem to be flying by so fast. Now it's only 8 weeks until Christmas!!!

Is it the height of laziness that instead of opening my calendar and counting, I asked Google how long it was until Christmas? It felt lazy.

These cupcakes are a "from the archives" post as they were originally made in July. A very good friend linked me a recipe for CocaCola cupcakes an embarrassingly long time ago and asked me to make them. I put them on my cupcake baking list but before I got around to baking them she got a wonderful new job and I didn't see her everyday anymore.

This post is particularly relevant as she had a Halloween party last night and we couldn't go, so now it has been a very very long time since we've caught up, so she's been in my thoughts.

Even though it was likely that she wasn't going to be able to try them, I still had to try and bake them in her honour. Unfortunately, the recipe she linked me seemed to have disappeared into the mass depths of the internet and I wasn't able to find it again. It was quite curious, as the delicious link I had saved redirected me to the blog-in-question's main page and I couldn't find the recipe in any of the archives. Strange.

Anyway, I had bought a big bottle of Coke and had to use it somehow, so I turned to faithful Google and found this recipe on Grab Your Fork. When Helen said that the texture of these cupcakesis very red velvet cake-like, I was very excited. I love red velvet cakes.

In an homage to Grab Your Fork, I also hunted down some sour cola lollies. I wasn't lucky enough to find cola flavour Wizz Fizz which would have been awesome.

I love recipes where I don't have to cream butter and sugar, because if there's anything this post shows it's that I can be lazy. The butter/cocoa/Coke mix smelled wonderful as it heated. The cola buttercream was lovely too. I reduced the amount of sugar as much as I could as I often find buttercreams too sweet and unfortunately I didn't take note of how much I ended up using. The cola added a lovely dimension to the icing. I'd be tempted to use it on other cakes as well.

The cupcakes were a win during the still-warm-from-the-oven taste test. Moist and chocolatey. I thought they had a fantastic depth of flavour that can be missing from standard cupcakes. When paired with the buttercream, it was a lovely contrast between all the components, even the sour lolly!! These cakes were made just as D and I started to watch what we were eating, and so the taste test cupcakes were cut in half so we each had half. We had to divide the sour lolly too because the lollies finished the cupcakes so well.

I raved about the cupcakes on facebook and another friend decided to give them a go. Hers were less than successful, she said that they were no better than any other chocolate cupcake recipe she had tried and she was disappointed. I felt a little guilty for prompting her to make something she didn't enjoy, especially when ours turned out so well. I hope if you give them a try you enjoy them as much as we did!

Head on over to Grab Your Fork if you want to try the recipe. It can be found here.