Surprises from the Kitchen

It's no secret that I like to bake cupcakes.

(You didn't know that? Check out my previous posts here, here, here, here, here and here.)

So you can imagine that I was pretty intrigued when I spotted a pin on Pinterest that suggested dropping Hershey's Kisses into cupcakes while they were baking to create a tasty chocolate interior.

Kisses? Inside a cupcake? Must.Try.

So I did.

I picked up a bag of these in an after-Christmas clearance sale:

Cherry cordial calls for dark chocolate, if you ask me, so I made dark chocolate cupcakes. Make the cupcakes as you normally would, filling the liner 2/3 of the way full. Bake as directed, but 5 minutes into the baking time, drop an unwrapped Kiss in the center of each cupcake.

Important note: Do not push the Kiss down. It will be absorbed by the cupcake as it bakes. I tried it both ways and learned that giving it a gentle push resulted in the Kiss sticking to the bottom of the cupcake liner.

When they finish baking, they'll look like this:

Let the cupcakes fully cool, then frost and decorate as you normally would. I was lazy and used frosting from a tub and chocolate sprinkles.

Don't judge me on the lack of homemade frosting - which I fully agree makes any cupcake, from a mix or from scratch, taste six billion times better. Frosting from a tub tastes just fine when there is a cherry cordial chocolate center.

Kind of blurry - I was battling Bridget and The Boy


Verdict on this Pinterest idea? Yum-my! I'll definitely make cupcakes this way again.

By the way, I remove the pins of items that I've tried and repin them on a board called From Hayley Daily. That makes it easier to keep track of what I have and haven't done...and determine if I liked it or not. Click on the hyperlink to follow that board. (If you're interested, that is!).