Welcome to kidscookdinner.com.  To learn more about how this website started, scroll down a few posts.  Otherwise, just to read about what my brother and I are cooking, stay right here. To celebrate the 4th of July, I (Alex) decided to make an All-American favorite: Hostess Cupcakes.  The recipe is pretty easy, but there are a lot of steps so it takes some time because you have to: (1) make the cupcakes; (2) make the filling; and (3) finally make the frosting.  The most important ingredient that you might not have on hand is marshmallow fluff and the most important tool is a cake decorating kit.  We didn’t have any of our cake decorating tips (or piping bags) so we had to improvise a bit, as you will see.

The Cupcakes: the first step is to make the chocolate cupcakes.  You combine flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder and then separate two eggs and then whip them.

Then it’s time to combine the egg yolks and the dry ingredients.

Meanwhile, you beat the egg whites and gently fold them into the chocolate batter.

Then it’s time to divide into 12 cupcakes.  Max gave me an assist on this.

Then into a preheated 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes.

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The Filling: while the cupcakes are cooling (they need to cool completely), you make the filling: this is easy: just combine marshmallow fluff, powdered sugar, butter and a little cream.  Then you are supposed to use a cake decorating tip and piping bag to in pipe the filling directly into the cupcakes.  We didn’t have a good cake decorating tip (just a very small one) and no piping bags, so this was kind of a disaster.  We couldn’t get the filling to go into the cupcakes (and the plastic bags we tried to use kept bursting).  Ultimate we sliced the cupcakes horizontally and filled them that way. (It was so messy, we couldn’t take photos)

The Frosting: for the frosting you combine heavy cream, chopped bitter sweet chocolate and butter to make a ganache.  (Frankly, I think it was a little to bitter so next time I am going to do 1/2 bitter sweet and 1/2 semi-sweet.)

Then you are supposed to dip the cupcakes in the bowl of frosting, but we really couldn’t do that because we had split them in half so we just frosted them normally.

The final touch is the fine, squiggly line across the top.  That was impossible without cake decorating tools so we improvised again by putting a circle of white frosting (the filling) on top.  Slightly unorthodox, but still delicious!