...continued... Cupcakes, a little sweet, a little savory

As promised.  

The final result of the Chocolate Pretzel Cupcakes.  

I have been told that they were absolutely delish!

Well, here's the finished cupcake, prior to any topping or decoration.  I know it doesn't look like much, but a cupcake it is!  And CHOCOLATE with salty pretzel bottoms, at that!!!

The first thing I did was chop up the chocolate for the ganache, I think I'll use bittersweet chocolate chips next time to save time, and put the heavy cream in a pot and bring it to almost a boil. 

And as you all know, once the cream is almost to a boil, don't let it, it will boil over the top of your pot!  

Once the cream was hot enough, I poured it over the chopped chocolate and then stirred. 

(This was a very thin ganache, more so then what I have made in the past, but I could still work with it.) 

Surprisingly, this ganache recipe didn't call for any butter like my other recipe does, so I added a little butter with the vanilla once the chocolate was smooth.  The recipe said to dip the cupcakes into the bowl of ganache, well, I didn't buy small squeeze bottles for nothing!  So I put the ganache into the bottle and went to work.  You should have seen the mess under the cupcakes when I was done putting the ganache on them!  But it was so easy to clean up! 

A cooling rack and a cutting board under the cupcakes to catch the dripping chocolate!

At that point, I crushed some pretzels and put them on top of the ganache.  

The original recipe I found, http://www.cupcakeproject.com/2007/07/chocolate-pretzel-cupcakes-first.html, said to put 24 pretzels on a cookie sheet and then put a chocolate kiss on them and put in the oven for 1-2 minutes for the kiss to melt.  Well, the heat of my oven is either way off or the kisses I purchased had melting issues, either way, my cupcakes didn't get the whole pretzel with a kiss and an M & M, not all of them anyway.  

And in trying to "make" the chocolate melt, I turned the heat in my oven up.  That backfired on me; I ended up burning the chocolate and setting off the smoke detectors in my house!  If I have any mice in my garage, they got a nice meal of burnt semi-melted chocolate with pretzels!  

So I decided to improvise.  

I put more pretzels on a cookie sheet and grabbed my chocolate chips, still, no luck in the melting department, so I did what I could.

Not all of the cupcakes got the extra pretzel decoration!

  

And the final product:

I did not have one left from Friday Night Fellowship!  

Just had pretzel crumbs!  

I didn't get to hear people talking about how they tasted as I was with my group for the 2011 Young Adult Talent Show.  But I did have a couple of people tell me that they really liked them, including my Dad!  I had one person tell me that they need a disclaimer warning that they needed a Wet-Nap after they finished eating the cupcake!

Have a blessed day!

Happy 1st Birthday Mikayla Paige Hayden! 

~a