Oreo Cupcakes
I have been searching for a good Oreo cupcake recipe for a while now, and after coming across this one on another blog –A Cup Full Of Cake, I decided to give it a try. A lot of the cupcake bases for Oreo cupcakes tend to incorporate an Oreo within it somehow, but I liked this recipe as it could just focus on a plain chocolate sponge, with an Oreo buttercream frosting instead. I made a mixture of full sized and mini cupcakes – the full sized cupcakes have a mini Oreo stuck on top but I left those off the mini cupcakes (see picture above!) as I thought it might be a little too much for a mini cupcake.
The base of the cupcake is just a standard chocolate cupcake – I find that the best recipe for this comes from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook – it creates light and spongy cupcakes.
This is the first time I used a different type of buttercream – the standard type I tend to go for uses icing sugar, milk and butter. This frosting is a meringue buttercream which consists of egg whites, granulated sugar and butter. Personally, I prefer this frosting, it isn’t as sweet and very creamy – although it could be a little too creamy for some tastes as this uses a lot more butter than the standard recipe. In other meringue-style recipes, such as the macaroons, you tend to just whip the egg whites together until they form a stiff peak but with this recipe, you have to whisk the egg whites and sugar in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.
After adding the Oreo crumbs to the buttercream mixture, the frosting is done! I went a little overboard with the Oreo crumbs, I was only supposed to use 7/8 Oreos but ended up using a whole pack instead because it gave the buttercream more Oreo flavour! I may have been a little heavy handed with the vanilla extract and to make up for this, I decided to add mini Oreos into the centre of each cupcake, to make sure that you can really taste the Oreo flavour. I dug out small holes in each cupcake and placed a mini Oreo into the hole, then covered it with frosting.
I read on The Hummingbird Bakery’s Facebook page how to create their signature frosting style – which doesn’t use a piping bag and nozzle. Definitely sounded easier than it was to do! I tried it on one cupcake but was didn’t achieve anywhere near the same result, so stuck to a piping bag in the end. I finished the cupcakes with the leftover Oreo spinkles and a mini Oreo.. yum!
