Alliterative Dessert

Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cupcakes! I recently saw a chocolate-covered red velvet cake ball, and I was Inspired. I happened to have an excellent chocolate cherry cupcake recipe, so I thought the best thing in the world would be to make a chocolate-covered cherry cupcake.

See the dyed red icing? That's just normal icing with red food coloring!

Full disclosure: I got this recipe from a Nigella Lawson book. She’s prettier than Giada de Laurentiis and uses more butter than Paula Dean. Caveat eator: this cupcake is not for the clogged of heart.

Cupcakes:
1/2 cup soft unsalted butter
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (Ghirardelli’s baking chocolate)
1 1/4 cups black cherry preserves (I used a kind with no cane sugar added)
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
1 cup self-rising cake flour*
12 maraschino cherries

Icing:
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate (see above)
1 cup heavy cream
Splash of kirsch or kirschwasser, whatever your alcohol controller lets you have

* Don’t be a dbag and buy self-rising cake flour. Sift together 1 1/2 tsp of baking powder (See the word powder? It’s not baking soda.) and 1/2 tsp salt for every one cup of flour. Hey, that’s how much flour this recipe calls for!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Put your butter in the pan at medium low. Once it’s almost all melty, melt the chocolate in that. I used a nonstick pan, by the way. Okay, is all your shit mostly melted? Take it off the burner, and stir it around gentle-like until it’s a smooth, happy butter chocolate mixture. For maximum visceral pleasure, use a silicone spoon in your nonstick pan. It’s really like calling out to God, and having him pat you on the cheek and telling you you have nice skin. Now toss in your cherry preserve, sugar, salt, and eggs. Stir until it LOVES you.

When everything is looking pretty mixed together, pour it over the flour and mix it all together. Depending on your preserves, the stuff is pretty chunky, so be really diligent in making sure you don’t have massive clumps of flour in your stuff.

You should have a sticky, chunky batter. It glops. Put that into cupcake cups, then pop it in the oven. Because the batter is so sticky, I used a #20 ice cream disher, just like Alton Brown tells me to, and it worked like a charm.

Bake for 25 minutes, and you should have exquisitely perfect looking cupcakes. You can stop here if you like, but only if you suck.

You can do this pretty much as soon as your fingers can take the heat. Take a pastry round. I used a 1″ round. Cut a hole in your cupcake, not straight to the bottom! You can dig out the hole, but I found that if I twisted the round a couple times, the whole cupcake center would pop right out. Pop a maraschino cherry into the hole, pull a little bit of cupcake off the bottom of your cupcake hole, then pop the cap back on. If you’re willing to substitute cleanliness for deliciousness, pour a splash of the kirschvasser into the hole with your cherry.

Now the icing! You can get it thicker by using less whipping cream. The original recipe asks for 1/3 + 1 tsp cups of cream. But I wanted the tops of my cupcakes to look like chocolate candy, so I made my icing watery, poured it on, then waited for it to set. It’s a tough icing to make, though. Here we go. Put your stove on medium low. Use a heavy-bottomed pot that you can whisk in. Put the chocolate in the the pot. Put the heavy cream in the pot. Put a splash of kirschvasser into the pot. Bring it all to a boil. Once it’s bubbly, take the pot off of the heat, then whisk the shit out of it. It should be smooth and pretty when you’re done.

While it’s liquidy, smooth the concoction over your cupcakes, which surely have totally cooled by now. Seriously. You didn’t just ice a warm cupcake, did you?

For the cool red marks, drip some red food coloring into your icing. Mix. Then drip it down in awesome patterns onto your cupcake.

Conclusions: Everyone likes the cupcake. According to Frazier, it is delicious but messy. According to Gloria, you cannot drink a very hopsy beer after eating it. If I had one wish, I would wish that Whole Foods carried morello cherries, which are cherries essentially pickled in liquor. Alas, the Clarendon Whole Foods has failed me. Good thing I have all of this hopsy beer to console me in these dark days.