Cookin' It Old School

For our first Cookin' It Old School attempt, we tried out the "Fudge Cake (Quick 'n Easy)" recipe, compliments of WASHINGTON ALL-PURPOSE FLOUR:

First things first, we gathered up all of our ingredients.

In place of unsweetened chocolate we used Ghirardelli's 60% Cacao semi-sweet baking chips (since we had it on hand), and we used a light cream instead of milk. The first step of the recipe is preparing the chocolate mixture. The recipe calls for you to mix the chocolate with sugar and water over heat, to create a smooth sauce. I found that the chocolate and the water didn't mix very well, and I felt like we lost a lot of the cocoa flavor; next time we do the recipe, we're going to try it with milk instead.

While Matt worked on the chocolate, I blended together the dry ingredients.

Added the cream and butter.

And beat that all together.

Next, Matt slowly added the chocolate and we blended the whole mixture together.

Until smooth.

Normally you need two 9 inch layer tins, but we didn't have cake tins, so we decided to make do with cupcakes. This cut our cooking time down to about 20-25 minutes, so if you go this route, plan accordingly.

Matt poured the batter.

Here they are, all about half full.

In at 350 degrees.

So, while the cupcakes were baking, we decided we needed an icing. Originally we were going to a glaze that required powdered sugar, but realized we didn't have any! So we resorted to a traditional buttercream icing, just butter, sugar and a couple other things (I'll post the real recipe again when I find it).

The cupcakes came out looking lovely and smelling amazing, but we decided to try another method of icing before we used our buttercream, namely putting a marshmallow atop so it will melt over the treat. What we didn't realize is that you're supposed to put the marshmallow on about two minutes before the baked good is ready to come out of the oven (so it will melt while they're still cooking).