A few times a year I'll have the pleasure of a visit from a dear friend of many years. Whenever she comes, we love to bake together. Last time she came during apple- and pumpkin-picking season, and we had a blast trying out different apple and pumpkin recipes.

This time, it was chocolate, fudge, and candy weekend.

The first picture shows the "cupcakes" - half of them made in cupcake tins and the other half in a popover pan. I only have one cupcake pan, and it was too late at night to do two batches in one pan.

The Chocolate Mint Cupcakes were absolutely delicious. Unfortunately, the icing did not follow suit.

We should have used our powers of deduction to realize that unsweetened chocolate + butter + mint extract DOES NOT = sweet icing. However, we were blindly following the recipe.

Thankfully, we decided to test it out before icing all of our precious cakes. Yuck, bitter as anything!

First, we tried to add some powdered sugar. When that didn't work, we tried cream cheese. By this time it was very late at night so we gave up and left them until the next day. Just before we threw it out, we tried dipping in a few strawberries. Success!

If you find yourself with bitter frosting, try it on some strawberries. It just might save you from wasting a pan of chocolate.

We were out of butter, and didn't feel like making a trip to the store. So the next day we found this fantastic list of icing recipes.

We chose one, split it up in to several dishes, and colored each dish with a dot of food coloring. We had a blast decorating each cupcake with a design, and it made it much more fun than simple chocolate icing!

Labels: Desserts, Tips, Variations