Chocolate Truffle Cupcakes

Chocolate Truffle Cupcakes are delicious and gluten-free. They are even better when topped with raspberry sauce and lemon creme fraiche. To give them a fancy look, garnish with a mint leaf and a fresh raspberry.

When I first started making this gluten-free dessert, I made it as a cake in a springform pan. I cut the recipe in half to make cupcakes. Since I already had a jumbo cupcake pan in the RV for several breakfast recipes, I didn’t have to squeeze in one more pan into my small cabinets.

If you’d rather make a chocolate truffle cake instead of cupcakes, double the ingredients, use a non-stick 9-inch springform pan, and double the cooking time.

I tend to be a lazy cook, always looking for shortcuts. When I made raspberry sauce for the first time, I thought why strain the seeds? That sounds like a job for a fancy chef with tweezers. I eat seeds in fresh raspberries, right? Why bother to strain the seeds from this sauce? After trying it once, I can answer that question. With one bite of that unstrained sauce, you’ll be spitting out seeds stuck in your teeth for 30 minutes.

My original recipe called for bittersweet chocolate chips. While preparing this blog post, I made two batches of chocolate truffle cupcakes, one with bittersweet chocolate, the other with semi-sweet. On first taste, three out of four taste testers had a slight preference for semi-sweet. Within a few bites, they couldn’t tell the difference. Either one works fine.

News Flash!

I recently served these to 4- and 6-year-old boys. They wouldn’t even taste the raspberry sauce and lemon creme fraiche, but they loved the cupcakes. Zeke said, “It’s kind of like a peanut butter cup without the peanut butter.” His comment made me think about how to add peanut butter. Now you can try chocolate and peanut butter chip truffle cupcakes!

Serves: 6

Active time: 30 minutes Total time: 55 minutes

Specialized One-Butt Kitchen Utensils

Use a Jumbo Non-Stick Muffin Pan. Even though my pan is supposedly “nonstick,” I still use butter and a light dusting of flour to make it easier to get the muffins out of the pan.
With a 7-inch Mesh Strainer you can remove those annoying seeds from the raspberry sauce.
Use a Whisk to blend the eggs into the chocolate sauce.

Ingredients

butter and flour (gluten-free or regular) to prepare the muffin pan
4 ounces unsalted butter, cut into 8 to 12 chunks for quicker melting in the microwave
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup strong coffee (decaf recommended unless you want to stay up late)
1 cup bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 eggs
1 cup peanut butter chips (optional, see note below in directions)*

Directions

Preheat oven to 350. Generously butter the sides and bottoms of the cups in a non-stick jumbo muffin pan. Dust with flour.

In a large microwave-safe bowl, combine butter, sugar, coffee and chocolate chips. Heat in microwave on high power for 2 minutes. Stir with a spoon until smooth. If lumps of chocolate remain, return to microwave to cook in 30-second increments until the mixture is well blended after stirring. Quickly whisk in eggs until smooth.

*For the peanut butter version, let the mixture cool for 10 to 15 minutes, then stir in the peanut butter chips. If you add the peanut butter chips too soon, they’ll melt. Of course, if you do this, you can skip the raspberry sauce and lemon creme fraiche.

Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake in preheated oven 20 to 25 minutes, or until top is crusty and dry to the touch. Let cool in pan. Place a paper towel on the countertop, then turn over the muffin pan to release the cupcakes onto the paper towel. If cupcakes are stuck to sides of pan, run a knife around the edge of pan to loosen the cupcakes.

Let cool before serving. Top with raspberry sauce and lemon creme fraiche (optional).

Store leftover cupcakes in a covered Ziplock container in the refrigerator. Serve cool or at room temperature.

Raspberry Sauce

Ingredients

10-oz bag frozen raspberries, partially thawed
2½ tbsp powdered sugar (or more to taste)
a few drops of hot water if the mixture is too frozen and thick to blend easily

Directions

Blend raspberries and powdered sugar in food processor or blender until smooth. Mixture will be very seedy. Put a 7-inch fine mesh strainer over a large bowl. Pour the raspberry pulp into the strainer to remove the seeds. Stir with a spoon to press the sauce through the strainer into the bowl. Use a spoon to stir the pureed raspberries. That helps to separate the seeds from the sauce. Use a second spoon to scrape the sauce off the bottom of the strainer.

You can also let it sit for few minutes and let gravity do some of the work. Taste it to make sure the seeds are out. If not, strain it a second time with finer mesh strainer. Keep refrigerated until ready to serve.

Cooking in a One-Butt Kitchen

Chocolate Truffle Cupcakes

News Flash!