Marbled raspberry vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting

Baking cupcakes was one of the highlights of my weekend along with seeing The Hunger Games and doing some volunteer work. When it comes to baking, I'm still not ready yet to create my own recipe from scratch. Therefore, after a look at what I had on hand, I decided to make some marbled raspberry vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting. Mainly because I came across the frozen raspberries left over from the raspberry white chocolate scones I made recently. 

The recipe I chose for the cupcakes can be found here, but I again decided to create my own batch of frosting. I gave the cupcakes a bit of an Easter theme in honour of the upcoming weekend and the supplies I had previously bought.

I didn't use the decorative picks this time, but I figured I would probably make more cupcakes during the long weekend or find an alternate use for them. The trickiest part of the recipe was the swirling of the raspberry through the vanilla portion of the cupcake. Although, I would have to say that the cupcake batter was one of the tastiest I have ever come across. Furthermore, it was the perfect amount of batter, creating exactly twelve cupcakes.

I baked them for the full twenty minutes and the swirled effect did look pretty cool once I had taken the cupcakes out of the oven.

For the batch of chocolate frosting, I used the following:

• 1 & 1/4 cups butter, softened
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder, sifted
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 2 & 1/2 cups icing sugar
• 2 tbsp milk

I chopped up the butter and whipped it for approximately one minute before I added the sifted cocoa powder for further mixing. To this, I added the vanilla essence then the first cup of icing sugar, scrapping down the sides of the bowl as it combined. At this stage I poured in the milk and finally the remainder of the icing sugar. Once it was all combined I whipped it for a further minute. Applying the frosting to the cupcakes involved my Wilton 1M decorating tip of course. The Easter theme wasn't done with either as I added a sprinkling of colourful egg mix sprinkles. These delightful cupcakes were the perfect treat to eat whilst waiting in the cinema line yesterday. What better way to transport them there then in a very cute cupcake box courtesy of Wilton. They sure do think of everything!

And in case you were wondering, The Hunger Games was fantastic, worth seeing more than once on the big screen. I so cannot wait for the second movie!