how to make chocolate campfire cupcakes

It's been ten days since the girls' cowboy birthday party, but so much has happened since then it may as well have been a month.  We celebrated our wedding anniversary, Bearhands went to Sydney, I got back into scuba diving, the Big Sister got crook, we survived two earthquakes, we had a dinner party and somewhere in amongst all of that I think I got some sleep.

But before the party slides into distant memory and farm folklore I wanted to share another recipe. To the uninitiated it looks like just another chocolate cupcake recipe, but if you're the mother of a cowgirl, you'll recognise that these are, in fact, chocolate campfire cupcakes.

how to make chocolate campfire cupcakes

Ingredients:

125g butter
¾ cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups self raising flour
⅓ cup cocoa
⅔ cup milk

Method:

Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla and beat well. Alternating between the flour and cocoa and the milk, fold in the remaining ingredients until combined.

Spoon the mix into a cupcake pan (I used paper patty liners). Bake at 180°C for twenty minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle of a cupcake comes out clean. Cool in the tin for ten minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Allow to cool completely before icing.

buttercream icing

Ingredients:

125g butter
1 ½ cups icing sugar
1 tbs milk
splash vanilla extract

Method:

Beat together the butter, vanilla and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Add the milk, a splash at a time. If you want to add a colour - say, flame red - this is the time to do it. Beat until the colour is well distributed. Keep adding splashes of milk until you achieve your ideal consistency.

to construct your campfire cupcakes

Ingredients:

cupcakes
buttercream icing
flake chocolates (about eight)

Top each cupcake with a smear of icing - this will act as the glue that will hold your flake 'logs' in place. Carefully split the flakes into logs - I found my flakes crumbled a bit but I kept the 'waste' to offer the kids on a less sugar-loaded day!

Lay your flake 'logs' around the outside of the cupcake, meeting in the middle like a campfire. Then pipe your buttercream icing flame in the centre. I used a star tip in my piping bag and then flared out the flame with a toothpick to make sure it didn't look like a big red poo, because in my experience, kids of this age can see a poo in just about anything.

So, good friends, that is how to make a campfire cupcake. I hope this of use to parents of cowgirls the world over. Equally, may it also be helpful to the sires of scouts and the grandparents of girl guides.

How are things at your place? Experienced any earthquakes lately?