It was the weekend again … and another batch of cupcakes.  Originally we were going to do a lemon blueberry cupcake (I think) but I found some blood oranges in the grocery store and bought them.  It was an accident – I thought they were normal navel oranges, until I had one and found a rather pinkish color.  Abby saw me eat the orange and said ‘now we can make the blood orange cupcakes!’ (imagine that said at the top of her very excited voice!).

So, we made the chocolate orange cake recipe (see the full recipe here) – the worst part of the whole recipe is cooking the oranges at the beginning.  Unfortunately this time I don’t think I left them in the saucepan for long enough and we had some rather chunky pieces through the batter.  But they turned out really well – like those Jaffa candies that we grew up with in Australia – anyone know of an American equivalent?

Abby didn’t really want to go overboard with decorating this weekend … wait, what happened to my decorating daughter?  Anyway, she just wanted to have some chocolate buttercream frosting and she was happy with that.  But I suggested some gummy worms we had in the cupboard from a failed worms in the mud experiment (let’s just not talk about that weekend of baking failures, shall we?).  

And then I asked Abby what Biblical reference were we going to have with these.  And she came up with Joseph.  Let me explain.  Joseph had a coat of many colors (hence the gummy worms) which was covered in blood (hence the blood oranges) by his jealous brothers.  For those of you who would like to remind yourselves of the story, look up Genesis 37 and following.  I thought it was kind of clever, so we stuck by the name.

And they tasted great (apart from the big chunks of orange zest in them).  Abby did really well with the buttercream frosting this time around, and I think they looked sweet with the gummy worms on top!

I think we’re going to have a break from cupcakes next weekend.  It will be just after the indulgences of Christmas, so I don’t think we will really need to make more sweets to have in our house!  But happy to hear any suggestions for other flavors, just in case Abby loses her list, or gets bored with the Cupcake Wars flavors!

Until next time, enjoy cooking at home … with kids!

Sarah