Last week, the lovely folk over at Sugar and Crumbs sent me over a selection of their products to try. Expecting just a couple of packets in a jiffy bag, imagine my delight when I opened this lovely goodie bag!
If you haven’t heard of Sugar and Crumbs, they are a UK based company, offer all-natural flavoured icings sugars and cocoa powders. The selection they sent me are some of their newest – salted caramel, and coffee icing sugars, and a cherry cocoa powder. Their range of products is already flavour-tastically diverse, and seems to be growing all the time.
As much as I wanted to just get a spoon and eat the salted caramel sugar, lack of time meant I stuck with a good old-fashioned chocolate cake as my first test, using the chocolate cherry cocoa powder.
It looks and bakes exactly like a normal cocoa powder, but with the addition of a sweet cherry tang.
To get the most out of the flavour, the recipe enclosed suggested using a standard sponge recipe, substituting one quarter of the flour for cocoa powder. The result – a light, intense chocolate mixture, which baked into rich and fluffy cupcakes.
Once cool, I wanted to keep the topping for the cupcakes sweet and simple. What could complement the chocolate cherry flavor better than chocolate… and a cherry!
I melted down a big bar of dark chocolate, then carefully dipped in each cherry about halfway, holding by its stalk. This is such a satisfying process!
Carefully placing the chocolate cherries onto some greaseproof paper, they went into the fridge for a little while to set.
Once the cherries were set, I topped the cupcakes with a couple of layers of chocolate. Leaving the first layer to set for about a minute, before spooning on the second, gave it just that little time to set and create the ripple effect. And to finish – a cherry on top!
The finished cupcakes, simple but very yummy! And the taste? Well the cherry flavor is subtly sweet against the rich chocolate. All in all a great easy twist on a standard cherry cupcake. I look forward to trying more of the Sugar and Crumbs range soon!
Disclaimer - the products in this post were provided by Sugar and Crumbs for review. However all opinions are entirely my own.
