I borrowed this recipe from the BBC because we had loads of frozen blackberries leftover in the freezer that we picked out of summer berry smoothie mixes as the blackberries are often quite sour. So, what better way to use them up than to make some yummy dark chocolate and blackberry purple velvet cupcakes! Quite a mouthful I know but trust me, these are actually a lot easier than they sound and don’t take very long (maybe an hour) to make at all. I’d love to see your recreations! The recipe below makes 12 cupcakes.
I was actually really happy with how these turned out and think they looked great! I love the naturally pink icing the blackberries produced and you could even serve them without the cases to showcase the amazing purple colour of the cake inside. Once again, hope you love this recipe as much as I did! 💜
Ingredients for the cupcakes:
- 150g blackberries + 12 for decorating
- 100g butter
- 100g chocolate broken into small chunks
- 225g self-raising flour
- 175g golden caster sugar
- 2 tbsp cocoa powder
- 2 large eggs, beaten
- a lil red or purple food colouring
Ingredients for the icing:
- 150g blackberries
- 100g unsalted butter at room temperature
- 500g icing sugar sifted
- 1 tbsp vanilla paste / extract
How to make the cupcakes:
- Heat the oven to 180 degrees C and line a 12-hole muffin tin with paper cases.
- Roughly crush 150g of the blackberries (half of the overall amount for this recipe including icing) using a fork so the juice runs out but there are still some chunks of berry.
- Gently melt the butter and chocolate in a saucepan.
- Mix the flour, sugar, cocoa powder and a pinch of salt in a large mixing bowl.
- Put the kettle on. (For a cuppa and also for the cupcakes haha)
- Scrape the butter-choccy mix and eggs into the dry ingredients with the crushed blackberries and 100ml of boiling water.
- Mix together until smooth, then add a little bit of food colouring to enhance the purple/red colour.
- Divide the mixture between the muffin cases and bake for 15-20 minutes until risen and a skewer comes out clean when poked in the middle.
- Transfer the cakes from the tin onto a wire cooling rack and leave to completely cool (or if you’re impatient like me, stick ’em in the fridge for a while).
How to make the icing:
- Whizz the remaining 150g of blackberries to a purée.
- Beat the butter, icing sugar and vanilla together until the mixture looks really pale and cloud-like. This will take quite a while – maybe 5 to 10 minutes sometimes!
- Sieve the rest of your blackberry purée and gently fold it into the icing.
- Spoon a piping bag fitted with your favourite nozzle and pipe a generous amount onto each cupcake.
- Top each cake with a blackberry. Enjoy!
leith’s recovery 