Is It Possible To Have Too Much Chocolate?

Well, IS it?!   It's hard for me to know - I'm defective.  I like chocolate but I don't LLLOOOOOVVVEEE  chocolate.  Hubby is a chocoholic, but me … I'm into fruity flavors, like the lemon cupcakes.

I'm working on the last batch of trial cupcakes for the wedding.  I left chocolate for last because .. hum .. let me see … I'm not sure, but it was probably because I didn't think I would be doing anything other than using a box of cake mix.  Not much trial and error involved there.

I don't want to get too far away from the cake mix because I really am concerned about time issues.  The lemon cupcakes are, by far, the most complicated and time consuming - and it shows.  They are seriously exceptional and well above  the others I've made.    BUT now, I feel like just using the chocolate cake mix would be such a blah cupcake that I started searching for something to ramp it up a bit. 

With my trusty Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix in hand, I started to do some recipe searching.  About that time I started wondering what the difference is between devil's food and chocolate cake.  What I found isn't really definitive, but it seems that devil's food may be a richer, more dense cake than plain chocolate cake because it uses butter and melted chocolate (when made from scratch). 

Some years ago, someone started putting applesauce in cakes, to replace some of the fat.  Then someone got the idea to put pudding in the cake mix to make a really moist cake.  Originally, we had to add our own pudding, but at least one of the cake mix companies now has some cupcake mixes that already have the pudding.  Oddly, I have never tried adding pudding to any cake mix (or applesauce, for that matter).  Today, I tried it.

In my recipe search, I came across a website - and I am truly sorry that I can't remember which one because I looked at so many and made a lot of notes and then I couldn't find my way back to it - that said to add a small package of instant chocolate pudding, 1 cup of sour cream, 1/2 cup water, and 1/2 cup oil with 4 eggs to the chocolate cake mix.  It is RARE that I have sour cream in the fridge.  It's another one of my quirks - WHY do I want to eat SOUR cream?  I don't drink SOUR milk?  But I did have an 8 oz tub of sour cream because I confused the ingredients of 3 different lemon frosting recipes and ended up with this stupid sour cream that I didn't know what to do with!  I shall call it 'Providence' because if I didn't have that in the fridge I would never have tried this "recipe".

Since I'm still fearing the cupcake paper fiasco, I used 1 of each kind that I will be using on the wedding cupcakes, PLUS one of the kind that peeled so terribly.  Then I finished up with using the liner I intend to use with the chocolate cupcakes.  After they had been out of the oven for an hour none were peeling.  But I'm sad.  They were all lovely with their puffy domed tops and now they're just plain FLAT.  The frosting will hide that, but still ….

 Again, soothe my need to make "special" cupcakes I decided I needed chocolate frosting on the chocolate cupcakes.  But the color of chocolate won't work with the decorations.  So I'm going with white chocolate frosting.  I hope.  I made the recipe but it is almost runny.  VERY high fat with the cocoa butter, butter, and cream.  The recipe called for 3 1/2 Cups of powdered sugar but it was still soupy, but by the time I added another cup of the sugar the chocolate flavor started to disappear.  I managed to pipe frosting on all 24 of the cupcakes and am sent them to work with hubby.

As it turns out, the devil's food / chocolate cake was fantastic!  It certainly deserves a special frosting, but since the chocolate flavor went missing I still don't know if the white chocolate frosting will be too much.  The frosting got RAVE reviews - even higher ratings than the lemon!  Sometime later this week, I'm going to have to make the cupcakes again and try to adjust the icing recipe and add more white chocolate.  Or maybe just leave well enough alone. 

As a last comment:  NONE of the cupcake liners peeled. Not even the one that peeled on every cupcake.  I made sure the batter was spread out to the sides of the liners.  There was no buttermilk in the recipe and whole eggs (vs egg whites) were used.