As part of my Superbowl snack-food-a-palooza, I made Martha’s Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Chocolate Chip Frosting (p. 152 Martha Stewart Living February).

The Batter

These cupcakes are a little more complicated than your basic cupcake. First of all, you need cake flour. This meant a trip to the store for me (if I could count the number of trips to the store Martha has resulted in for me…). You make your batter with butter and sugar, milk, vanilla, cake flour, salt and baking powder. Then you beat some egg whites until they have stiff peaks and fold that into the batter. Then you fold in chocolate chips. The batter tasted *really* good. Light and fluffy and wonderful.

I poured it into my cupcake pans. The recipe says it makes 30. Please raise your hand if you normally make cupcakes using two pans. I know I do. Who has 3? I made 24 and they were fine.

While they were baking, I made the frosting, which is buttercream with chocolate chips. I cut the recipe for this in half since it said it made 4 cups which seemed like a lot to me.

Mayhem slightly repaired

The cupcakes came out nicely. Frosting them was a bit of a situation though. It did not go well.  Mayhem might be the word. The cupcakes simply shredded when I spread the frosting on using my offset spatula. The tops were ripping off, the sides were collapsing. It was not a good situation. It took a lot of work and care to spread the frosting and repair the rips that happened. I gave up on several and did not even try to get the frosting all the way to the edges.

The Playing Field

Now for the taste test. The cupcakes were pretty good. This is really a very good concept. My son asked me how they are different from chocolate chip muffins and they are softer and lighter than that. The finished cupcake did not taste as good as the batter did though! It was a little dry I thought.  It was tasty, however.

There was one major flaw with this recipe. All of the chocolate chips sunk to the bottom of the cupcakes! This is not a good situation.

The Sinking Chips

My other problem is the frosting. I just didn’t like it. It was too sweet. Just grossly sweet. And somehow full sized chocolate chips seemed too big in the frosting. These almost don’t need any frosting at all in my opinion. So this one is kind of a mixed bag – good, not great.