The Hunt for The Best Chocolate Cupcake Recipe.

I love baking elaborate, decadent desserts. And thanks to wonderful food blogs and Allrecipes, I have had success with most of what I have made. I have done recipes from scratch and using box mixes. I've made baked goods, cold desserts, and no-bake desserts.  I love sweets! Over the years I have made chocolate pudding pies, cookie dough truffles,  honey bun bundt cakes, cherry cheesecakes, fruit pizza, brownies, drop cookies, and lemon cupcakes with a blueberry frosting. And then it dawned on me, I've never made a vanilla or chocolate cake or cupcake. How strange? In my attempt to make amazing desserts, I missed out on the most basic of all, the chocolate or vanilla cupcake. I tend to set weekly food goals, and this week I was to find a simple and tasty chocolate cupcake recipe.

How hard could it be? It's one of the most basic of recipes. Wow, was I wrong! It was not easy at all! I first checked my trusty Allrecipes site and could not find a recipe from scratch  that was rated over four stars. I rarely make anything from that site that is under a five star rating so off to Google for a search. After looking through a few of the search pages, I was still disappointed with most of what I found.  Some of the well rated chocolate cupcakes were made with brewed coffee, which did not appeal to me. I finally after much searching found a blog recipe that I liked and was simple enough that it wouldn't take much time to try out. Then I started to read the reviews, and many of the reviewers had complained of the cupcakes caving in and flattening.  I knew there were several types of cocoa powders and decided to do some research and found this:  Types of cocoa powder. The recipe didn't specify what type of cocoa powder to use but had baking powder as an ingredient. From what I read at Joy of Baking is that with baking powder, you use  Dutch-Processed powder not natural unsweetened cocoapowder. After my research, I had lost all faith in the recipe and started a new search.

I decided to search on Food Network. There has to be something I like on their site because they do run a whole network based on food! But it STILL was not easy to find a simple non-coffee as an ingredient chocolate cupcake recipe. I had to look through pages and pages of recipes! Finally, I found a simple chocolate cupcake recipe: Chocolate Cupcakes After all that searching this was it; I'm done. This IS the recipe I will try. I didn't want to use my expensive cocoa for a test recipe and hadn't even heard of Scharffen Berger, so I used a basic natural cocoa powder. And what a great decision! The cupcakes had a wonderful chocolate flavor, great texture, and a moist taste. After the success of this recipe, I will consider buying the Scharffen Berger to try next time I make these cupcakes.

It might have taken me several hours of research, but it was definitely worth it. Since it is a weeknight and this was just a test recipe, I used canned frosting. But next time I will try the frosting that goes with the recipe. I really like this recipe, but I might try a couple other chocolate cupcake recipes for comparison. But I think next week I will try to find a good vanilla cupcake recipe. Let's hope it is easier than finding a chocolate cupcake recipe.