Recipe #34: Night & Day Cupcakes

While I was flicking through my recipe book trying to decide on my next recipe, I asked My Guy "what should I bake next, honey?" His response (and I am not making this up):

"You should make me a huge banana loaf flavoured cheesecake, with a chocolate-fudge-brownie base. Is that possible? Oh, and it should have chocolate chips too. I mean, if I'm doing ALLLL the dishes, it might as well be for something awesome."

So I made Night & Day Cupcakes. Obviously.

Close-ups galore! Yowza!

We were expecting some pretty special guests when I made these (Mum & Dad, yay!), and as my mum is gluten-and-pretty-much-everything-else-in-the-entire-world intolerant, including any flours made with potatoes or chickpeas, I decided to substitute my normal baking flour for rice flour so she could join in on the cupcake fun. Rice flour though - what a weird texture that stuff has right? It's so fine that it's almost chalky, and my batter ended up having a bit of a weird consistency (er, that is to say it was really gritty). *Side-note: I would advise against dipping your finger in any raw batter made using straight rice flour. 

Other than substituting the rice flour though, these were a pretty basic chocolate cupcake, with only a few ingredients, and they were really easy to make. They only took a few minutes to whip up, and I found some really cute cafe style cupcake wrappers to make them look that extra little but swanky. (I'm not gonna lie, I kinda wanted to greet my baking-queen mum with some awesome cupcakes when her and Dad arrived from the airport). Funnily enough, mum ended up doing the majority of the cooking during their two week visit. Aw yeah, mum's cooking!

So yeah, like I said. GRITTY. The actual cupcake itself had that undeniably sandy texture that comes with rice flour, so that was a little bit of a let-down. The flavour was nice though, and they were otherwise light and fluffy. And if there is anything at all that I've learned throughout the course of my kitchen trials and tribulations, it is this: CREAM CHEESE FIXES EVERYTHING.

Behold - chocolate cupcakes, topped with cream cheese icing and chocolate covered coffee beans, a.k.a. 'Night & Day Cupcakes'.

Unfortunately the texture put Chris off a bit. His rating: 2.5/5
But I think one extra special lady sure appreciated chocolate cupcakes she was actually allowed to eat!

Hanging out with Ma & Pa x