These are really good cupcakes. They are both made with a chocolate cake mix but one is filled with a chocolate fudge frosting and the other is filled with raspberry cream. The chocolate filled one is topped with a caramel flavored frosting and drizzled with caramel sauce. The raspberry cream filled one is topped with a raspberry frosting and drizzled with a raspberry sauce.
Sound good?
Here’s how to make both cupcakes, so you can decide which filled cupcake method is better–chocolate-filled cupcakes or cream-filled cupcakes?
The Filled Cupcakes Base
For both of these recipes, we used our cream cake mix, Fudgy Baby Cakes. A cream cake is denser than boxed mixes from the store, halfway to a pound cake. A cream cake balances much better with the frosting and filling.
If you have a favorite chocolate cake recipe, try that. Most scratch cakes have more substance than cakes from the boxed mixes and are not so easily overwhelmed by frostings and fillings.
Fudge-Filled Cupcakes
We filled these cupcakes with fudge frosting. We thought maybe frosting on the inside and frosting on the outside would be too much. It wasn’t, at least not for most folks. We served them in the store and folks loved them.
Don’t try making these cupcakes without a very good fudge frosting. If you are making the frosting from scratch, I would recommend a butter-based frosting. You can find a great recipe at the bottom. We have a very good premade fudgy frosting. That’s what we used. It’s good enough that you could sit on the couch in front of the TV and eat it out of the tub with a spoon. (It also comes in a salted caramel frosting.)
We used a caramel frosting on top of the cupcakes. We simply made vanilla buttercream frosting and added caramel flavor. We drizzled a little caramel dessert sauce over the buttercream. The caramel glistened and cupcakes looked like they were gilded—very pretty but simple.
Instructions:
- Make the frosting according to the recipe or use the premade frosting and fill it into a pastry bag.
- To fill the cupcakes, equip a large pastry bag with a star tip and press the tip ½ inch deep into the cupcakes and squeeze. You’ll feel the cupcakes swell and get heavier. That will tell you when you have enough frosting inside a cupcake.
- Top the cupcakes with a nice buttercream frosting drizzled with caramel dessert sauce.
Raspberry Cream Filled Cupcakes
We used exactly the same cupcakes but we wanted a mixture of raspberry pastry filling and Bavarian cream pastry filling inside the cupcakes.
These were beautiful cupcakes that tasted great.
Instructions:
- Clip off the corners of the pastry filling bags and press the tips into the cupcakes one at a time, filling the cupcakes twice–once with raspberry and once with bavarian cream.
- Frost the cupcakes with raspberry buttercream and drizzle the tops with raspberry dessert sauce.
Easy Fudge Frosting
- 1/4 cup Ramstadt Breda Rich Dark Cocoa or equal
- 4 tablespoons butter
- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
- 1 tablespoon meringue powder
- 2 tablespoons water plus more to make the right consistency
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
Directions:
- Melt the butter in a medium bowl in the microwave.
- Add the cocoa, powdered sugar, and meringue powder.
- Add the vanilla and water and mix adding more water as necessary to reach the desired consistency.
(Updated from March 2, 2016)
