November 2st, right after all the craziness of  Halloween calms down, it's time to start getting ready for Christmas. And the first thing to get me into the Christmas mood is baking.

I love cupcakes, so that's why I decided to make them and share them with you because they are honestly the best cupcakes ever.

My original inspiration behind them was a recipe from Tany Burr's book Love Tanya, but I've put my own twist on it.

For starters, I get out all of my ingredients that I'll need, weigh them out and preheat the oven on 180°C/360°F. The ingredients that you'll need for the cupcakes are:

* 180g of caster sugar 

* 160g of plain flour

* 60g of cocoa powder

* 50g of butter

* 2 teaspoons of baking powder 

* 1 egg

* 160ml of milk

* vanilla extract

* orange or lemon extract

* rum extract 

* some fudge candy

You will also need a cupcake tray and some paper cases. For the frosting you will need:

 * 250g of mascarpone

* 20g of sugar

* 70ml of milk

* sprinkles of your choice

* chocolate sauce

First, you want to separate your egg whites and egg yolk. Add some of the sugar to the egg whites and whip them so you get nice stiff peaks. In a different bowl mix together the egg yolk, cocoa powder dissolved in milk, room temperature butter and sugar. Once everything is combined you add plain flour and baking powder and at the end all of the extracts.

Once all of the ingredients are combined you put the mixture into pre-lined cupcake tray with paper cases, but you only fill them 1/3 of the way. You put a piece of fudge in the middle and then fill them up so you reach about 2/3 of the case. I definitely filled them way too much and they went over the cases, so I had to cut them down a bit, so make sure you don't fill them too much.



   

Once you finish filling them up, you put them into the oven and bake them for 20 minutes. Once they're done you take them out and let them cool down.

While the cupcakes are cooling down, you can prepare the topping. You mix the mascarpone, the sugar and milk together and put it into a piping bag.

Once the cupcakes are cold you can start decorating them. I piped the frosting on the top and then just added some of the chocolate sauce and I went for white and pink heart sprinkles and pink sugar.

They are so simple to make and they are so tasty. If you want you can totally take your own spin on it and they'll still taste amazing.