Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes
CATEGORIES
INGREDIENTS
  • Cooking Time: 40
  • Servings: 24
  • Preparation Time: 60
  • 2 x 425g tins of cherries
  • 4 eggs
  • 200g dark chocolate, I used 70% cocoa
  • 200g golden caster sugar
  • 250g butter
  • 300g self-raising flour
  • To Decorate:
  • Dark chocolate ganache
  • Some fresh cherries
DIRECTIONS
  1. Start by preheating your oven to 160°C and prepare two 12-hole cupcake trays with cases.
  2. Put one tin of cherries in a food processor (with the syrup) and whizz up until you have a smooth purée. Discard the syrup from the second tin and cut the remaining cherries in half and keep until later.
  3. Decant your cherry purée into a saucepan along with the dark chocolate, sugar and butter and stir over a low heat until the chocolate melts and you have a smooth mixture.
  4. Pour this into a large bowl, leave to cool for 15 minutes then add the eggs, flour and the halved cherries from step two and mix together until combined. The mixture will look quite runny but don’t worry, it’s supposed to.
  5. Divide the mixture evenly between the cupcake cases and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until they feel firm when lightly pressed.
  6. When baked, leave them in the tray to cool for five minutes before moving them to a wire rack until completely cool.
  7. To Decorate:
  8. Whip up a batch of dark chocolate ganache and fill a piping bag fitted with an open star nozzle (I used the Wilton 1M nozzle).
  9. Top with a generous swirl of ganache and finish with a fresh cherry.
  10. ENJOY!
RECIPE BACKSTORY
I love visiting pick your own farms and orchards so this week I visited Leapers Rock near Morecambe and had a great time picking fresh strawberries and gooseberries to take home. They also had ready-picked cherries for sale so I treated myself to a couple of punnets and left feeling inspired to use them to make some Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes. In this recipe I use tinned cherries in syrup to make the cupcakes and I topped each of them off with a fresh red cherry from the orchard. Here is the recipe if you’d like to give them a try, please let me know how you get on.