Chocolate Streusel Cupcakes

I'm late! I'm late! I baked the cupcakes Thursday night, but then headed off to a local SF con, GaFilk, for the weekend. Thus the photos didn't get downloaded and the writeup was delayed. Oh, well.

This is, as Marie said, very quick and easy even if not on the list in the back of Rose's Heavenly Cakes as such. I went with the alternate cupcake approach instead of a little bundt-style cake plus 2 cupcakes--I thought the cake might look a little too small for a coffeecake. As it turns out, this is more a pound cake than what I'd call a coffeecake, and the bundt pan would have been fine. The cupcakes worked, though!


Instead of streusels I've done before which were usually sugar (often brown sugar), butter, and flour with cinnamon, this one is just brown sugar, cocoa powder, and cinnamon. It doesn't have much different texture than the cake--you just get the hit of chocolate as you bite. It's a nice change.

The cake batter is pretty standard, and I won't walk through the steps. I put the bottom layer of batter in 12 cupcake liners in a standard muffin pan then divided the streusel mixture between them. Then I added the top layer of batter, and realized that even though I'd filled the muffin cups probably too full, there was no way all that batter was going to fit. So, I made 2 additional (and smallish) cupcakes, without the streusel. And indeed, I had overfilled the cupcake liners and also probably was slow getting the batter into the oven, as I layered and spread batter and pondered extra cupcakes, so the leavening may have lost some oomph. Anyway, I ended up with flat-topped cupcakes, though the chocolate swirl was still very pretty.

Tasting results: the cake, as I said, is very pound cake-ish and very like last week's. Again, the texture is more open than my standard pound cake. The flavor is very nice but the cake is quite sweet. I first tasted one of the overflow cupcakes that missed out on the streusel, and those seemed very sweet--the chocolate layer helps to cut that sweet-sweet effect, I think.

The cupcakes were shared with the folks next door on the Friday snow day (we got about an inch at my house--that's plenty to shut Atlanta down, especially with some ice underneath), and the only comments I got back were from sister-in-law and younger niece who both said "very sweet". Hey, we're consistent!