Did I mention I ended up buying a stand mixer after all?

Well, I did.  Thanks Amazon, you’re the best!

With this new mixer, my boyfriend and I decided to try out the S’more cupcake recipe I mentioned in a previous post from Bakerella.  As excited as I was to use the mixer, it was a little sad that we only used it for approximately 30 seconds total…but it was still awesome.

Anyway, on to the cupcakes!

We didn’t actually do everything mentioned in the recipe; the additional chocolate ganache and topping marshmallows we didn’t get to, but the rest we completed in its entirety.  The recipe was fun, but unfortunately we ran into a few problems…

But first…BEHOLD!

Here, we have the prettiest of the dozen cupcakes I baked today.  Yes, this was 1 of the 4 presentable cupcakes that came out of the entire batch.  Notice the nice distinct line between the graham cracker and chocolate halves of the cupcake and the gooey marshmallow center.  Here are what the rest looked like:

Unfortunately, while the cupcakes were still edible, 2/3 of them were mushy disasters (seen above).

Verdict

Delicious…but poorly executed on my part.

The chocolate portion of the cupcakes were fabulously chocolaty, and the graham crackers portion was buttery and delicious.  The marshmallows were a bit too melted to be able to definitively taste, but I’m sure they didn’t negatively affect the flavor.

The tough thing about these cupcakes, at least if you’ve never made them before and don’t know any better (like me), is that you can’t poke them with a toothpick to see if they’re done; I assumed that the marshmallow inside would always be gooey and thusly never yield a clean toothpick.  I foolishly decided not to poke around inside any cupcakes and just let them cool after around 15 minutes of baking.  When I finally pulled them out of the tin…most were pretty gushy on the bottom.

Still, making them was pretty fun.  The funniest part of the baking process was pulling the cupcakes out of the oven and seeing that they had, in fact, ALL collapsed in the middle:

It’s a little tough to tell from the picture, but each of these cupcakes had a fissure in the center.  You probably had to be there, but it was pretty entertaining.  Nothing says “failed project” more than “there’s a giant hole in the center of my cupcake.” XD

Don’t get me wrong, though: the cupcakes were still tasty.  They just required a fork to devour.

Things I Larn’d

• Always make sure you bake your pastry all the way through.  It’s worth digging through 1 cupcake to be sure the rest of them will be cooked thoroughly.
• Don’t overfill your cupcake tin.  I’m pretty sure the reason most of these cupcakes were soupy at the bottom, despite being cooked for the full allotted time, was that they were just filled too full.
• Measure, don’t eyeball, when you’re told to divide a measurement in half.  This recipe said to mix all the dry ingredients together, then split them in half, adding graham crackers to one and cocoa to the other.  I eyeballed the division and ended up with a much thicker chocolate mixture than I probably was supposed to.