Happy birthday to two of our sales representatives at Creative Loafing!
In honor of their birthdays, I decided to bring out the big guns … filled and frosted cupcakes that took me a good portion of my afternoon/evening to make. (Complicated assembly required.)
These Ice Cream Sundae Cupcakes don’t really have any ice cream in them, but only resemble sundaes (sorry, you ice-cream-o-holics). But they just may be better than an ice cream sundae. The base is a chocolate cake, which is then cored and filled with chocolate ganache, piped with vanilla buttercream, and then topped with sprinkles and a cherry, oh yes, and more ganache.
The creamy chocolate center and the buttery, rich frosting made the birthday boy and girl, and co-workers, very, very, happy. According to some, these taste ridiculously fantastic. Really, how freaking cute are these? So cute I can almost overlook the hassle of making them…

After the chocolate cupcakes are baked and cooled, you’ll need to dig out a core. I didn’t have a round cookie cutter small enough to cut out the middles of the cupcakes, so I used an inverted circular piping tip instead and used the tip of a knife to pop the core out.
Once cored, you spoon in the ganache filling, which is just a melted mixture of cream, chocolate, and butter.


The buttercream frosting requires 5 minutes of whipping after each 1/2 cup addition of powdered sugar. Thank goodness for the KitchenAid stand mixer, because that adds up to a lot of whipping. To get the frosting to look like whipped cream, I used a round piping tip.
After you pipe the little white clouds of frosting on each, drizzle on more ganache sauce, add rainbow-colored sprinkles, and top with a stemmed maraschino cherry. Read the rest of this entry »