TWD: Chocolate chocolate cupcakes

After living vicariously through all the "TWD" bakers out there, I finally have jumped on the bandwagon. (Yes, the October deadline had a lot to do with motivating me)

This weeks recipe, Chocolate-Chocolate Cupcakes, was selected by Clara of I Heart Food4Thought You can find the recipe on her website or on pages 215-217 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking From my Home to Yours"

Although I carefully weighed all my ingredients and took the cupcakes out of the oven the second the tops of the cakes were dry and springy to the touch and a knife inserted into the center came out clean (21-22 mins) as Dorie described, I found these cupcakes to be on the dry side.

I only had one issue with the recipe... the step where you fold the melted chocolate into the batter, ...I scraped all the chocolate into the batter at once, grabbed my spatula to fold it in, and hit a big lump of chocolate! The entire amount of melted chocolate had solidified! grrrrrrrrr. (the chocolate was around 74 degrees, the cake batter around 66 degrees when I merged the two.)

I removed the big lump of chocolate out, wiped off all the cake mix that I could, and stuck it in the microwave until it was pliable again. Then I mixed it into the batter slowly. I think there were still some small pieces of chocolate that solidified but they seemed to have melted when I baked the cupcakes.

I wanted to do something different with the cupcakes so I used the vanilla cream filling that Baking Bites posted on her site. For half of the cupcakes, I used her method of filling the cupcakes ,

for the other half, I used a faster method... I shoved the piping tip into the cupcake and squeezed the pastry bag until the cupcake swelled. (some of them cracked because I squeezed too much. See the one on the left below)

The cupcakes using Baking Bites method (shown below) looked nicer and more symmetrical than the ones I filled by shoving the tip into. (shown above) However, I'm probably the only one who noticed.

I'm have a lot to learn when it comes to baking... especially when it comes to chocolate. I really, really don't like chocolate. Not only does it end up all over my kitchen, but it doesn't behave the way it's supposed to. Please leave me a message on what I need to do differently to get chocolate under control. Perhaps there's an obedience training class out there that you could recommend?