One of the decent-looking heart cupcakes.
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, I decided to stay up and put up this blog post. I just finished making these for work tomorrow.
I found the idea for these adorable heart cupcakes on the Glorious Treats blog.
Hearts cut out from the cupcake tops.
I made the cupcakes with the Glorious Treats perfectly chocolate cupcakes recipe. I had Hershey’s cocoa and wasn’t sure that counted as “good quality,” so I decided to be safe and go with the Hershey’s dark chocolate cocoa to ensure a great chocolate taste. They turned out tasting great. Very chocolatey, moist and light.
However, in trying to ensure that my cupcakes were domed enough to make the heart cupcakes, I overfilled them a bit. In the end, this made it more difficult to pull off the pretty heart cupcakes, so I don’t recommend it. As long as the cupcake bakes up over the top of the wrapper, you’ll be in good shape. No need to go overboard. (The result for me is some cupcakes with rough — and not so pretty — edges. I photographed the nicer ones of the batch.)
Broken hearts for my co-worker's last day.
I didn’t want to buy a jar of maraschino cherries to make the cherry frosting suggested with the heart cupcakes. (Plus, I’m not a huge fan of cherry-flavored things. I sometimes make things I don’t expect to like, but I didn’t feel like it this time.) So instead I made the vanilla cream cheese frosting that Glorious Treats suggested on the chocolate cupcakes page (and I added some pink gel food coloring).
The assembly worked well. I made mini “sandwiches” with the cut-out heart pieces around a bit of extra frosting. (The cut-out pieces would be great decorations on a platter with the cupcakes, but since these are for work, I usually keep them in Gladware all day so overall presentation isn’t something I strive for.
Because Valentine’s Day also happens to be the last day in our office for one of our co-workers, the bakers in my area are going with a broken-heart theme. So I used some sugar pearls to make cracked hearts on some of the cupcakes.
This is a pretty clean-looking cupcake, but I could have mounded the frosting more in the middle so it would pop up a bit more.
