Week 3: Flourless Chocolate Cupcakes

Ethan's cupcakes turned skeptics into believers (in flourless baking)!

The flourless chocolate cupcake is more like a mini-soufflé than a cupcake, both in terms of the result and how it is prepared. The hardest part of the process is incorporating the fluffy egg whites into the chocolate stage. The original recipe isn’t real specific on how to incorporate them.  I’d recommend dividing the egg foam into thirds.  The first third of the egg foam just whisk in to the chocolate mixture to lighten it.  The next third, fold the mixture about 20-30 times until mostly incorporated.  The final third fold in about 15-20 times to keep the mixture light and fluffy.

 

These cupcakes tasted like
baked hot chocolate. Yum!

The other thing I discovered about the original is that it has you way over filling the cupcake liner.  I’d recommend only filling the liner half full.  I used a standard cookie disher and found that if you just scoop from that, generally one scoop was enough. Granted the scoops will be a little more full than they would be with cookie dough.

One batch will fill two 12 cupcake pans with cupcakes, meaning a single batch produces about twice as many cupcakes as the single batch of other cupcakes, so be prepared.  I never made mine look as neat as hers.  Mine always had a little more overflow than hers did, and I never experimented enough to find a solution.  If anyone else has tried them, you might leave a suggestion.

If I could change anything about the recipe it would be to use a lighter whipped cream.  I used heavy whipping cream as the base and thought it was just a bit too thick.  Though the club seemed to really like the thick whipping cream so feel free to disregard this suggestion as the mad ramblings of an insane lunatic.