Bookish Bakes: Chocolate Friendship Cake

This one was inspired by Susan Mallery’s The Friendship List. I was part of the book blog tour this past Tuesday. It was a lovely book about two lifelong friends getting out of their sad comfort zones and rediscovering life and love. With two lifelong best friends of my own, I couldn’t not be inspired by this book.

I have so many food memories with my friends, from pancakes every morning after a sleepover to drinking melted chocolates to brownies to mall pretzels. Even though we did plenty of things that didn’t involve food, it’s still an important piece of us as a trio.

Chocolate is one thing we were never really able to say “no” to. I have a fond memory of leaving all of our chocolates in the car on a warm Spring day only to come back to find them melted. Being kids, of course we decided to drink it from the foil wrappers. I’m pretty sure my mom thought we were nuts. But we needed our chocolate.

So, in honor of friendship, I made chocolate chocolate chip cupcakes. The chocolate is for the memories. The chocolate chips are for the hard and tough things that inevitably get thrown into friendship. It’s not smooth and easy, not perfectly smooth and balanced. It can be delightful, it can be painful, it can be full of laughter, it can be sorrowful. So, if you choose to make this, I encourage you to use this as guidance and thrown in bits and pieces of your own friendships.

Note: I do ratio baking, which means I use ratios and weights to bake. The below makes 5 cupcakes, but it can be scaled up or down for more or less cake using the 2:2:1:1:1 ratio for a high ratio cake (2 parts flour to 2 parts sugar to 1 part egg to 1 part fat to 1 part liquid, meaning the egg, fat, and liquid should each weigh approximately the same and the flour and sugar each twice that of the egg weight.)

Chocolate Friendship Cake

Ingredients

50 grams butter (about 1/2 a stick)

100 grams of brown sugar plus granulated sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

100 grams flour plus cocoa powder (I usually get close to 50/50 with cocoa powder on the lower side)

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

50 grams hot water

chocolate chips, etc.

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a muffin tin.

2. Cream the butter and sugars together until smooth.

3. Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix.

4. Combine the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and baking soda in a separate bowl. Add to the butter and sugar mixture and mix until just combined. Add in chocolate chips and mix.

5. Add the hot water and mix until combined.

6. Fill the muffin tin with batter and place in the oven. Into the empty spots add water until about halfway. Bake for 15 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle of one cupcake comes out clean.

I made some caramel sauce earlier in the week, so of course I had to top my cupcakes with some, but they can be topped with the frosting of your choice.

Enjoy!

For my adventures in ratio baking, including some on how to ratio bake cakes, stop by the Kitchen.