The Reckless Chef

But wait! There’s more!

Click to zoom in on these two-faced cupcakes.

I couldn’t make cupcakes for the Harvey Dent campaign without them being…two-faced!

This recipe comes from….scribbles in a notebook. It’s loosely based on the basic chocolate cupcake recipe I use (again, minus the mint extract), but there’s butter in it, the ratios are a bit different, and only half of the recipe gets cocoa powder.

The recipe:
Two-Face Cupcakes
2 cups flour, either cake or all-purpose
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs, beaten
1 tbsp mayonnaise
1 tbsp canola oil
1/4 cup water

Do This
Preheat oven to 350.
Mix sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract in a large mixing bowl, either with a mixer on low speed or with a spoon. I used a spoon this time, it was actually much more effective than my hand-mixer once the dry ingredients came into play.
Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl. Gradually stir this dry ingredient mixture into the butter-sugar-egg-vanilla mix until it is a thick batter. Add in mayonnaise and oil, mix until well-blended.
Grab a second mixing bowl. Transfer half of the batter into this bowl, and add the cocoa powder to one of the batters. Stir until there is no dry cocoa powder remaining and you have a bowl of vanilla batter and a bowl of chocolate batter.
If either batch seems too thick (as in, if it won’t come off the spoon on its own when you try to spoon batter into cupcake papers), gradually add water until the desired consistency is reached. This should be slightly thicker than “normal” cupcake batter - it shouldn’t be runny at all, and it should hold its shape when dropped into a cupcake paper. This will prevent the two batters from blending, and allow for dinstinct yellow and chocolate halves.
Carefully spoon batter into cupcake papers. These two-toned cupcakes were much easier to make than I expected. Initially, I tried to use an index card as a separator inside of the cupcake papers. I thought it might help prevent the batter from running (and blending, and ruining the two-tone effect). But! It really wasn’t necessary, and after coating a few index cards with batter, I realized that this particular batter was thick enough to just carefully spoon into opposite sides of the cupcake papers and smooth out with a tablespoon.
Bake for approximately 20 minutes, do a toothpick-test, and remove from the oven when the toothpick comes out clean. Cool (on a wire rack, or propped up on your stove) for at least 15 minutes before frosting. Frost with colorful buttercream frosting of choice. Slice crosswise with a butterknife to impress your friends.

I’m very happy with how these turned out. I wasn’t sure if the batter would hold its place enough to bake a truly two-toned cupcake, but it definitely worked well!

Oh yeah, and I didn’t make anything green for St. Patrick’s Day, but if you want to see green cupcakes, go back to this post.