Some recipes happen because you’ve got ingredients lying around that you need to get rid of before something untoward happens to them. This is one of those.
The ingredient was the remains of a large bar of Toblerone—one of the 360g ones—which we’d picked up, along with assorted fruit and other ingredients, for the reconstruction of the original 1960s recipe for chocolate fondue. The “something untoward” was, when we were finished with making and shooting that recipe, the possibility that the rest of the Toblerone would just sort of softly and silently vanish away, like the Snark.
Which around here—a household inhabited by a couple of very committed chocolate eaters—became all too dangerous a possibility the longer the thing sat there on the counter in the center of the kitchen, looking innocent and defenseless. Soon I came to realize that if somebody didn’t come up with a plan for the rest of it in a hurry, it was very shortly going to be Snark time.
So I went hunting online for possible ways to make something more of that Toblerone bar than piece-by-piece triangular-shaped memories. As I was then engaged in let’s get-this-draft-kicked-into-order business on the next work scheduled for completion in the Middle Kingdoms universe, I didn’t want to get bogged down in something too involved. So… a cake? Cookies?
As I rummaged around I found myself crossing “cake” off the list, as we only had about 170g of the Toblerone left, and I thought that so small an amount might get lost in the bulk of the rest of the bake. Cookies were certainly another way to go, and I flirted briefly with these from a fellow Cabin Pressure fan.
But finally the thought Cupcakes…! started to intrude more insistently. Because even if there’s not that much Toblerone, I found myself thinking, there’s always frosting. (Disclosure: I’ve historically been one of those who consider cupcakes’ primary function to be as a frosting delivery device.)
…So that was settled. Now then, I thought, which recipe?
My immediate concern was that once you start adding chunked chocolate to a cupcake, it can change the interior chemistry somewhat, and (in my experience, anyway) sometimes chippy cupcakes can get dry. That possibility needed to be avoided at all costs. The basic cupcake mixture needed to contain something that would reliably boost the moisture.
My thoughts then turned more or less immediately to sour cream—especially since we had some good central-European smetana in the fridge—and after that, straight to a good basic chocolate cake I knew that was really very little trouble to make quickly, and could be done in the Cuisinart/Magimix: Nigella Lawson’s Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake.
I wanted a buttercream frosting for topping these, so I went to one I’ve used before—the basic chocolate buttercream at BBC Good Food. This calls for a heavy-ish dose of cocoa… which when increased just slightly (as I did) results in the frosting solidifying, as it settles, into a confection that’s almost like a soft fudge. It’s a perfect match for the Toblerone, if a slightly contrasting one because of the plainness of it.
In the execution stage I was forced by local circumstances to tweak Nigella’s recipe a little, as there were some Toblerone-adjacent suggestions to incorporate, as well as some problems at the local ingredient end (such as abruptly discovering we had no prepared vanilla of any kind). But things got sorted out as I went along.
The result was a really super cupcake, one I’d absolutely make again without it being any kind of use-up-the-ingredients stratagem. Check out the recipe, and (as we routinely say about experimentation around here) see how it works for you. Toblerone bars come in a 100g size in most places. You could grab a couple of those for when you feel inclined to try this out… and afterwards you’ll have a little left over (as is only right) for the cook.
Added to this recipe for our present purposes:
Going down the list and pulling together the mise en place, this was naturally the point where I discovered that we had no prepared vanilla of any kind… which around here is seriously unusual.
Fortunately this situation didn’t stop the proceedings, as up in the spice cupboard I had a couple of vanilla beans stashed away.
I therefore went to get the little knife we refer to locally as “the ‘Kill Your Darlings’ knife”—a present from my one-time story editor and dear friend, the much-missed Tom Swale—and sacrificed one of the beans in the appropriate manner (i.e., sliced it open and scraped out the intensely fragrant seeds; then chopped up the empty pod and shoved the pieces into the vanilla sugar jar).
(Note to self: add “vanilla beans” to whichever shopping list is most apropos. Since these are labeled in French, they therefore almost certainly came from BienManger.com.)
I also added something else that someone in my readings had suggested: a half teaspoon of almond extract, to help reinforce the nutty qualities of the Toblerone’s flavor.
When the lady said “Best-quality cocoa powder,” I thought, Okay, this is plainly what I’ve been saving the Valrhona for… (The Young Wizards readership will immediately recognize an alternate form of the stuff that Carmela Rodriguez once used to derail an armed alien invasion at the Crossings multicontinual worldgating facility. Trust Carmela to know that skimping on the quality of one’s materials is a deeply false economy.) …Anyway, in with the other dry ingredients it went.
Having gotten these and all the other necessary ingredients together (and Nigella wisely reminds the reader to do this in time for everything to warm up), the simplest way to proceed with making this cake batter, if you’ve got a food processor, seems to be:
This isn’t at all a complicated process, and takes about five minutes, if that.
(If you don’t have a food processor, I’d go the usual route: combine the dry ingredients together, combine the wet ingredients together, and then combine the two sets and beat with a beater or in a stand mixer until the batter is thick and well-combined.)
The next step, once the cake batter was made (and please forgive me for not photographing the unportioned-out batter), was to add the Toblerone. I had a glance around the online world at what size of chunks people were embedding in their cupcakes, and found some folks embedding entire triangles of T into them. That approach struck me as likely to produce some problems during baking. (And also as, well, kinda unsubtle.) Seemed wiser to me to go another route.
So I chopped up the 170g of remaining triangles, keeping for garnishing purposes the few topmost peaks that I managed to get off their triangles without significant damage.
The below image shows how small I’d chopped them about halfway through the chopping process. For scale, the Henckels knife in the shot (another named one: we call it “The Fright Knife” after the one that Julia Child had) is 25cm/9.8in long in the blade, and 5cm/2in wide at the blade’s base.
Every one of the large pieces you see in the image above was chopped into at least two smaller ones: sometimes more. The average size of pieces/”chips” that went into the batter was about 7mm-1cm / 0.25-0.30 inch in diameter. I wanted chips big enough to maintain some structural integrity during the baking process, and not melt away entirely.
These I stirred gently into the batter, and then put cupcake cups into my muffin tin/cupcake pan and filled them.
As it happens, these turned out to almost all be filled kinda too full. If I had another cupcake pan, it would’ve been wiser to fill maybe four or five more of them. But at the time I was in a hurry to get back to work, so I just partitioned the available cake batter into these twelve containers.
Then I baked them for twenty-five minutes. When they’d baked, this was the result: not horrifically messed up, but not as scenic as they might have been if I’d filled the cases a bit less.
Once they’d cooled, the first move was to immediately sacrifice the biggest one and see how it was inside.
It was fabulous. The cupcake proper was moist and tender and extremely darkly chocolatey, except for the occasional tender nugget of Toblerone—absolutely identifiable, and perfectly, meltingly soft. (I think the nougat may have helped with this.)
The other thing that was going on during this period was the making of the chocolate buttercream icing. Its ingredients are as follows:
We didn’t have any milk chocolate on hand, but we did have plenty of this dark Belgian one that we get from our bulk-flour people over at Kells Wholemeal, so that’s what I used. (More disclosure: if there’s a rift at the base of the otherwise solid relationship between Peter and me, it’s that he’s a Milk Chocolate person and I’m a Dark Chocolate person. Make of that what you will.)
There wasn’t enough of the Valrhona cocoa left to make up the necessary amount for this recipe, so I used Cadburys Bournville instead.
I hope everybody will forgive me for not photographing the process of making the buttercream frosting. I commend to you the BBC Good Food recipe’s page: they have a nice video that you can watch.
…Anyway, there’s not much more to say about this recipe except “Pipe the frosting onto the cooled cupcakes, and then have at them!” Which we did, after we photographed them. The cupcakes themselves are little moistly luscious treasuries of Toblerone-y loveliness, and the frosting (once it’s settled) becomes the next best thing to a soft firm creamy fudge.
I have to apologize in advance for my (lack of) piping skills, which the photos reveal to be ill-developed due to lack of practice. But this recipe could very well tempt me to do something about that as soon as some more cupcake-frosting nozzles come in…
Anyway: Give these a try and see how they work for you!
