Crunchie cupcakes

No, not crunchy as in texture, crunchie.....as in Cadbury’s Crunchie.

This buttercream is my own invention. Talking to The Boy Wonder (the Caked Crusader’s nephew) we established that his favourite chocolate bar was a Crunchie. I pondered that I’d never seen a recipe using this bar. The key, to me, was to retain that distinctive chocolate and honeycomb combination...so I came up with adding some to the buttercream and then using the rest as a crunchy topping.

When you’ve ground the Crunchie bars it’s a strange sensation because the taste is so distinctive yet the texture is alien. What I loved was that the chocolate taste was still evident and added an element of moisture to the crumb so it incorporated nicely into the buttercream. This is what five bars of Crunchie, blitzed to smithereens in the food processor looks like:

I made a chocolate cupcake but I was toying with making a vanilla sponge and swirling some golden syrup through it; I reckon this would’ve worked too.

Halloween isn’t a big event for my family but I made an (admittedly small) effort to be seasonal and used Halloween paper cases and picks.

Ingredients
For the cupcake sponge:
125g unsalted butter, at room temperature
125g caster sugar
2 eggs
100g self raising flour
25g cocoa powder
2 tablespoons milk
100g chocolate chips (I used milk but use whichever you prefer)

For the crunchie buttercream (warning: if you don’t like lashings of buttercream halve this recipe. My photos use the halved amount):
175g unsalted butter, at room temperature
350g icing sugar
3 tablespoons boiling water
5 crunchie bars (standard size), processed to oblivion i.e. fine crumbs

Method

- Preheat the oven to 190°C/fan oven 170°C/375°F/Gas mark 5.

- Line a cupcake pan with paper cases.

- Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Beat in the eggs, flour, milk and cocoa.

- When the mixture is smooth and well combined stir in the chocolate chips.

- Spoon into the paper cases.

- Bake for 12-15 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cupcakes comes out clean. Mine took 13 minutes.

- Leave to cool on a wire rack and remove from the tin when cool enough to handle.

- When the cupcakes are cool, you can make the buttercream.

- Beat the butter until soft then beat in the icing sugar and water. The buttercream will go rather slack but keep beating and it will start to firm up as the water cools.

- Beat in approximately half of the crunchie. It’s really important to have blitzed them to fine crumbs in the processor so that the buttercream isn’t gritty. The crumb is amazing and tastes of both honeycomb and chocolate.

- Spread the buttercream over the cupcakes. I found I had quite a lot of buttercream left over – in fact, it would probably have done a further 12 cupcakes, but I know that we all like different amounts of buttercream.

- Holding the cupcake, dip the buttercream into the remaining crunchie crumbs so that the whole surface is covered.

- Decorate as required.

- Bask in the glory of the wonderful thing you have made.

- Eat.