My Mom sent cupcake decorations, so we had to make cupcakes. It was difficult to motivate ourselves, but we persevered, using the recipe below.
Mocha Cupcakes
3⁄4 cup boiling water
2 Tablespoons Turkish coffee (Preferably the special blend procured from Uruguay by your uncle-in-law. Or espresso.)
1 1⁄2 cups flour
1⁄3 cup cocoa
1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder
1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
1⁄2 cup butter, cut into tablespoon-size pieces and softened about 10 minutes
3⁄4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1. Stir coffee into boiling water until dissolved. Cool to room temperature.
2. Oven: 350 degrees.
3. Whisk together flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
4. Beat "our good friends" butter and sugar in electric mixer until light and fluffy (2 minutes).
5. Add eggs, one at a time, blending well after each. Add vanilla, scrape sides, and beat for one more minute.
6. Yelp so loudly when 3 year old accidently shifts mixer to super-high that he never wants to even look at the mixer again.
7. Add half of flour mixture and beat for another minute. With mixer running, slowly pour in 1⁄2 of the coffee and mix until completely blended; repeat. (If you use Turkish coffee - and you will be ever so glad you did - stop short of pouring in all that sludge from the bottom.)
8. Pour into cupcake pan/liners or cake pan (butter or spray Pam first). We had large size liners but no large size muffin tin, so we just put a bunch of liners in a large rectangular cake pan, kind of smooshing them together... the cupcakes came out rather shorter and wider, but still tasty.
9. Bake exactly 11 minutes. Or 12. Depending.
Jonah made me a card using a doily my Mom had sent:
He actually had a really good idea... he used those paint dot markers (Do-A-Dot) to cover the doily so it looks watercolor-ish. And check out the cool texture because he got it so wet:
