We've been making chocolate buttercream cupcakes.

The kids wanted to cook chocolate cupcakes with buttercream fillings.  We've never cooked cupcakes before, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. The kids loved them and we will definitely be making some more. It was fun and we made a mess in the kitchen.

Ingredients

Cupcakes:

• 375g of plain flour

• 400g of caster sugar

• 30g dark cocoa powder

• 2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda

• 1 teaspoon of salt

• 2 free-range eggs

• 250ml of milk

• 250ml of water

• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

Buttercream:

• 250ml of vegetable oil

• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

• 50g of unsalted butter

• 50g of margarine

• 250g of icing sugar

• 1 pinch of salt

• 3 tablespoons of milk

Method

First, we preheated the oven to 190c, then we realised we didn't have any cupcakes over trays, oops! So a quick dart down the supermarket Hubby came home with a couple.

In a large bowl, we mixed together the plain flour, caster sugar, cocoa powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt. Once this was mixed I made a hole in the middle of the mix and cracked and poured in the eggs, along with the oil, milk, water and vanilla extract, mixing it all and thoroughly.  

Once I had a smooth consistency we poured the mix into the cupcake oven tray holes - half full, to allow for the rise.

You then bake them for 20 minutes.  

Whilst they were baking we started on making the buttercream.  You have to beat the butter and margarine until smooth and then blend in the icing sugar and salt. Slowly beat in the milk and vanilla extract until it is light and fluffy.  You are then meant to pipe the buttercream through the bottom of the cupcakes, but we didn't have any piping bags so we improvised and used the Calpol syringes instead - which worked perfectly.

Allow them to cool. 

We were super pleased with how well they came out!

 We popped them into our cupcake cases.

We syringed some of the vanilla cream into the to the middle of the cakes -syringing underneath. We don't have a piping bag, so I used the Calpol syringe instead, it worked perfectly.

Jacob wanted some sprinkles on his, so he spread some chocolate icing on the top first, and then tapped some sprinkles on top.