When my mom was growing up she wasn’t allowed to eat any junk food (don’t feel bad for her: her mom, my Grandma Jean, is a greak baker so Grandma Jean baked all kinds of cookies and pies and cakes for the family).  However, on New Year’s Eve my mom got to choose a packaged sweet to eat and she always chose Hostess Cupcakes.  So now every New Year’s, she has to have a Hostess Cupcake.  This year I (Alex) decided to see if I could make a homemade hostess cupcake to give to my mom.  They turned out really well.  Mom says they are better than the storebought ones.  (But they were a lot of work…)

The first step is to make a chocolate cupcake.  The batter I used (from Leite’s Culinara’s recipe) used natural cocoa powder for the chocolate flavor and seemed pretty stiff/dry.  Apparently it is supposed to be that way because the filling makes it really moist.

The second step was to make the white cream filling.  This was fun: just combine marshmallow fluff, powdered sugar and softened butter.  We waited till the cupcakes had cooled, made a little hole in the top and then piped in the filling.  The hard part was knowing if I put enough cream inside so I tried to overcompensate.  The recipe said to be careful to not put too much in in case the cupcake exploded…but I think that would have been cool if it did!  (And none did anyway)

The third step was to make the chocolate frosting.  The recipe called for using bittersweet chocolate only (mixed in with heated heavy cream and soft butter) and I was worried it would be too bitter so I did have semi-sweet and half bittersweet.  It was still slightly on the bitter side (which was ok because the rest of the cupcake is so sweet) but next time I am going to try making it with just semisweet chocolate.

Finally, after we frosted the cupcakes with the chocolate frosting we let them set for half an hour then put the white frosting on top. It was really simple… only softened butter and powdered sugar. Then the whole family experimented with making curlique (and other) designs on them.  They were really good.  NOTE: the recipe said to let the cupcakes sit for 6 hours in an airtight container before you ate them so that the cream filling made the whole cake more moist…are you kidding me??? Of course we couldn’t let them sit for 6 hours before we tried them! But to be fair, the ones we did let sit were a little more moist.