I started off using Grandma’s Chocolate Cake recipe from Cake & Commerce. It was delicious. One of the nice things about it is that it uses vegetable oil instead of butter so it’s easy to make it last minute. My butter is always in the freezer so if I have an immediate cupcake baking need it means waiting a few hours for it to soften or doing some work to speed it along.

That recipe doesn’t have instruction for cupcakes, but I filled each with 1/4 cup of batter and baked for 25 minutes on 350°. The cupcakes shrunk slightly but rose to have a nice little dome.  It yielded just over 2 dozen cupcakes.

I decided to do a mint frosting. Rather than doing a regular buttercream,  I used a white chocolate butter cream base and my modified recipe is below

. I’m just not feeling regular buttercream any more. The white chocolate buttercream is tasty without being cloyingly sweet. It’s also stiffens up a bit so that you don’t mess up your icing. That’s great if you plan to transport your cupcakes!

White Chocolate Mint Buttercream Frosting

yield 2 3/4 cups

Ingredients

• 2 sticks (1/2 pound) unsalted butter, softened
• 12 ounces white chocolate
• 1 cup confectioners’ sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract (do not use mint)