• Preheat the oven to 180 degrees and line a muffin tin with Halloween paper cases, or orange and black ones alternated if you do’t have patterned ones.

Line with Halloween cupcake cases

• Pop the stork, sugar, flour, baking powder and cocoa in to a food mixer, or use a hand whisk… then mix them all up until they resemble a crumb -like consistency.
• In a jug whisk up the eggs and milk, adding them to the dry mixture gradually and slowly until fully combined
• Now stir through about a teaspoon of orange food colouring.

Chocolate mixture pre-chocolate!

• Finally chop up your orange chocolate

Selection of orange chocolate to stir through

• Then…

Mix through until equally distributed

• Fill the cases 3/4 full; this mix does about 12 hearty cakes.
• Put in to the oven for 15 mins or until the tops spring back.

Baked to melting deliciousness

• Leave in the tin for 10 mins as they will be pretty squidgy form all that melted chocolate yummyness!
• Transfer to a cooling rack and leave to go completely cold

Cool on a wire rack

• Now make your frostings. I made a small batch of chocolate icing by combining the icing sugar, cocoa and butter with the milk in a food mixer and then stirring about 1tsp of orange flavouring through.
• The Fluff is leftover from a previous recipe which I froze.  All frostings can generally be frozen and this makes for mystery frosting section if like me you forget to label them in the freezer

Chocolate orange butter icing & marshmallow fluff

• I added a bit of red and yellow food colouring to give it a ghoulishly orange tinge.  Anyone who knows my previous posts will know I swear by gel food colours as they don’t run the consistency.
• Now you need to select a nozzle of your choice and fill a piping bag 50/50 with the two frostings.  I put the chocolate in first and then poured the fluff in as this is the gooey-est!

Swirly-tastic!

• This mixture is very messy so you will need to pipe the cakes and then get them in to the fridge asap!!!
• I swirled them, even though the mixture tends to slide together in a scary droopy fashion.

Frosted…messily but deliciously!!

• Quickly pop an orange segment on each one and then pop the spider cocktail sticks on too (if you have them).
• Ideally leave these in the fridge for as long as possible to maintain structural success

So ta daaaaaaaa….there we have spooky inspired chocolate-orange cupcakes, messy but well worth the effort of washing your hands afterwards.

They’re not Terry’s…they’re anyone’s…if you can bring yourself to share!

Thankfully Grant and I devoured one each the night before I took these in to work as they were snaffled up in record time!  It would appear that this flavour combo is one to revisit over and over again….