Taylor Swift’s ‘Speak Now’ Album Listening Party Cupcakes

Back in October my friends Shahlin and Sacha from Coup De Main asked me to make some cupcakes for their Taylor Swift advance ‘Speak Now’ album listening party! We had to make 48 cupcakes with frosting to match the album cover. I’d never made that amount of cupcakes before and luckily Carly helped out.

Shahlin requested chocolate / caramel flavoured cupcakes with buttercream frosting. We decided to test a few different ways of getting the caramel flavour in there with using our usual Chocolate Vegan Cupcake recipe (found here minus the peppermint essence and chocolate chips). We tried three different ways to put the caramel flavour in: a rolo in them, a piece of caramello chocolate in them or a drizzle of toffee syrup injected in them. Rolo won.

Carly and I took turns doing a dozen batch of cupcakes each at a time. That worked really well. Got to play quite a few games of Speed while we waited for each batch to bake.

Then came the buttercream frosting. The colour definitely didn’t turn out how I wanted it. The frosting itself was fine but I wanted the colour to be a super vibrant pink and purple to match the colours of the dress Taylor Swift wears on the album cover. However, due to disagreements, we didn’t put enough colouring in to get them to be that vibrant.

They still turned out pretty good in the end and we got some great feedback about them. Would have liked to put on some luster dust on top to make them shimmer like the album cover too but we ran out of time.

Interesting experience to say the least! So those were our Taylor Swift ‘Speak Now’ Chocolate and Caramel Surprise Cupakes!

Blue teal.

Teal is one of my favourite colours right now and I really want to try out the teal colouring gel I just got. I also really wanted to test out these black and white dotty cups I bought. Decided to go with something simple but not overly plain, so I made Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes.

Vanilla Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
(actually just vanilla butter cakes with added chocolate chips)

1 cup self raising flour
90g softened butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup caster sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milk
A handful or two of chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Sift flour into bowl, add butter, vanilla extract, sugar, eggs and milk.
Beat together until ingredients are combined and the mixture changes to a paler colour.
Bake for 20 minutes.

The paper cups I used didn’t really work as nicely as I had hoped. The ended up completely covered in grease from the mixture. I put them into a second cup to hide it but those just looked even worse. Bit of a bugger. I think if I really wanted to use them again I would bake them in plain cups and then pop them into the black and white dotty ones.

Vanilla Butter Cream Frosting

125g softened butter
240g icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk

Beat together. I then added in a little bit of whitener so that they yellow from the butter wouldn’t effect the teal, and then popped in some teal colouring gel. They came out a lot bluer than I would have liked but the colour is still stunning!

Carly made some adorable chocolate sugar cookies in the shape of bunnies and hearts to go with the cupcakes. They tasted delicious! I’ll eventually make some of these too and I’ll post the recipe then.

TIP: All cupcakes should really be eaten as a cupcake sandwich, as shown in one of the pictures above. Makes them so much easier to eat when they have so much frosting! Just break the cake part in two and take the bottom half and plonk it over the frosting and squish down. Nom nom nom!

Golden.

I recently got the recipe for the chocolate cake my mum makes which I had grown up with and decided to test it out in cupcake form. So these were my Chocolate and Golden Syrup Cupcakes… (I added golden syrup into the title of these because although the cake itself is just a normal chocolate cake, the golden syrup in it really stands out to me – enough to make it a prominent flavour).

Chocolate and Golden Syrup Cupcakes

1 cup sugar
113g butter
2 tablespoons golden syrup
1 egg
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/5 cup boiling water
2 cups self raising flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 180 C.
Beat butter and sugar together till creamy. Add egg and golden syrup.
Dissolve cocoa in boiling water and add to mixture.
Add sifted flour.
Add baking soda dissolved in milk.
Bake until done (maybe 20-25 mins)

And of course I used my usual Cream Cheese Frosting recipe (60g softened butter, 160g cream cheese and 3 cups icing sugar) which I split in two. One batch I added whitener to and the other I added some purple colouring gel. Once piped onto the cupcakes I added some chocolate sprinkles on top. Voila!

Minty fresh.

Carly and I had wanted to make Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes for a very long time. My boyfriend isn’t a fan of mint chocolate flavour so it had been put off for ages. We adapted a few recipes that we already had to create our own little masterpieces and boy were they delish!

Mint Chocolate Chip Cupcakes
This recipe is essentially just a vegan chocolate cake recipe, with added chocolate chips, peppermint essence and put into cupcake cases!

1 and 1/2 cups plain flour
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons cooking oil
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water
1 teaspoon peppermint essence
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven (not actually sure of heat, maybe around 160-180 C).
Mix all the dry ingredients.
Add 3/4 of the chocolate chips and mix.
Add all wet ingredients.
Divide mixture into 12 standard cupcake cases.
Sprinkle each one with the left over chocolate chips.
Bake until they look done? Haha. Not sure of the actual length of time. We just wing it.

We used our Cream Cheese Frosting recipe for the icing and added 1-2 teaspoons of peppermint essence and some green food colouring. Topped it off with some chopped up Cadbury Mint Bubbly. Yum!

These are Carly’s favourites so far and are definitely right up there for me. I think I still want to perfect the recipe though, I wasn’t completely sold on the vegan chocolate cake adaptation but they were still amazing and looked super cute!