Warning: This recipe contains spoilers! If you’re reading the Hannah Swensen “Murder, She Baked” series by Joanne Fluke, this contains a tiny spoiler from book five, Fudge Cupcake Murder.
There is a really fun little mystery added to the already intriguing murder mystery when a town famous recipe gets donated to Hannah’s Lake Eden Cookbook that she is compiling. Unfortunately, the recipe calls for 1/2c. of the “secret ingredient” and the person who created this recipe is no longer living, so the secret went with her. Hannah is determined to try and find this secret ingredient and put the recipe in the cookbook, and with a little help from some friends, she finally solves it and us readers get to try the recipe too! It was too much for me to resist. The recipe I chose to make from book five was the mysterious fudge cupcakes.
This recipe contains a few ingredients you might not have on hand (I know I didn’t) and it also requires a few more steps, but it was definitely worth it since I had a lot of fun baking these.
I haven’t used bakers chocolate very much in my baking, so this was a fun new experience for me. I love that you start off by making your own authentic raspberry chocolate sauce. Real chocolate in a recipe is always a good sign! This is step one so that it has time to cool before adding it to the batter that contains eggs.
This also took a couple extra bowls than usual, and a few extra steps with the wet and dry ingredients, but it was well worth it. Plus, it made me appreciate my hand mixer more than words can say!
Creaming the butter and sugar together takes awhile, and by hand, it takes even longer. Mixing it with the hand mixer worked wonderfully. Plus, you have to add all three eggs in one at a time and beat them in thoroughly after each addition. The hand mixer worked like a charm and made the light, fluffy batter you see on the right pictured above.
Next, you add the dry ingredients and the milk. It called for so little milk that I was kind of surprised, but the textured turned out beautiful. I opted to take the recipes advice and add the milk and the dry ingredients in thirds and use the mixer after each addition for the smoothest batter possible. It was like silk! Definitely good advice.
Mixing in the chocolate raspberry sauce was probably the most fun. It almost broke my heart to mix anything else into that silky batter, but it can only be improved with chocolate! After I let it rest, I mixed it again before filling the cupcake liners. The texture was awesome. I was definitely excited to taste these mystery cupcakes.
I think the absolute toughest part of this whole recipe was definitely the frosting. It says to do it on the stove top, but I did it in the microwave instead since I don’t do well with chocolate on a stove top. The frosting was much too runny at first, so I had to wonder if the results would have been different if I had done it like the recipe said. I also wondered if I would have ended up with a lumpy mess like usual when I try to use a double boiler. Either way, I found a way to make it work.
You have a couple different options if you go the microwave route like I did. Option one is to let it sit for about an hour or so stirring occasionally until it has cooled and thickened some, but not quite set. You can do like I did (pictured below) and dip them in the frosting and refrigerate them immediately. Be prepared form some pooling that you can remove later. HINT: If you do this, make sure to take the cupcake papers off!
You can also wait for it to set a little more until it’s spreadable and use a spatula. Towards the end of my dip frosting method, I ended up having to use a spatula to spread the last of it on and it went pretty well.
In the end, I really liked the frosting and the cupcakes were good, but I wish they were a bit more moist. If I try these again, I am going to try using raspberry jam instead of raspberry syrup and maybe 1/3c. sour cream or Greek yogurt. Until then, I have my work cut out for me trying to perfect the cupcakes my fiance and I are going to have at our wedding in October! It’s just a few short months away and I plan to try a new recipe every weekend. Next up: chocolate mayonnaise cupcakes!
For the recipe, check out Fudge Cupcake Murder by Joanne Fluke, The Lake Eden Cookbook, also by Joanne Fluke, or go here: https://www.hallmarkmoviesandmysteries.com/murder-she-baked-a-deadly-recipe/joanna-flukes-fudge-cupcakes-recipe
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