Valentine's Day Tuxedo Cupcakes

For Valentine's Day (gasp, almost a month away now....) I made Jamie's Black Tie Cupcakes from My Baking Addiction. A recently discovered her blog after trying to fill the gap of another blog I read that, much like this one, is too infrequent to keep my interest. Hopefully you haven't all given up on me! So, I found her blog and was instantly impressed and wanted to try one of her recipe's out and since it was V-day, chocolate was in order. The cupcakes were delicious but the frosting really was incredible. It was just the right amount of sweet and was amazingly creamy and didn't at all taste like cream cheese. To me this is a huge deal. I'm not adverse to cream cheese frosting but let's just say it would be my favorite. I love a buttercream but am finding them to be waaaay too sweet for most things that you wouldn't just take a tiny bite of. What I do love about a standard cream cheese frosting is that they are rarely ever too sweet because the bite from the cream cheese cuts the sugar nicely. I enjoy them from time to time but to have a cream cheese frosting that gets away with tasting not cream cheesy? Now that's a winner in my book (insert Charlie Sheen reference here). I'm sorry if I offend the cream cheese lovers of there. Never the less, you'll know it has cream cheese even if you can't taste it so you'll probably enjoy it just the same. Anyway, the end result was a decadent, creamy, not too sweet (or sour), frosting that perfectly paired with a rich chocolate cake. The cake on the other hand wasn't very good. The coffee proportions were all wrong which may have been my fault (I used fresh espresso and diluted a bit instead of instant espresso). I've had many other chocolate cakes that use instant espresso and they are wonderful (i.e. Ina Garten's) but this one just didn't work. I would highly recommend sticking to Rose's Heavely Devil's Food Cake for that one. See previous post for the recipe here. There is NO comparison as far as I'm concerned. Best chocolate cake ever. But maybe that's why all other chocolate cake's pale in comparison?

Oh! AND these cupcakes were filled with chocolate ganache. So if you're a chocolate fanatic I'm sure you will enjoy this little detail. For me? It was a bit much. But there are a few chocolate fanatics (and some not as much) of my acquaintance that loved this part especially.

I topped them with a little more of the frosting mixed with a TON of red food coloring. I couldn't believe how much it took to make it a true red! I was using gel as well and it took so much! So be prepared for that. I'll blame it on the cream cheese. It must absorb food coloring into a black hole of some sorts. Only explanation.

Photos by Collin Monda