Fire and Ice Cupcakes

Fire and Ice Cupcakes

Last Sunday was the Season 2 premiere of Game of Thrones, this awesome show on HBO that everyone should be watching. So for the premiere I decided to dedicate my cupcakes that week to the show. I googled "Game of Thrones cupcakes" and came up empty handed, so went to the twitter-sphere to get some ideas. One of my sister's friends gave me the idea of fire and ice, a theme of the show. Then I went looking for spicy but sweet recipes. I found a really good Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcake recipe on Write Meg's blog. Chocolate and cayenne with cinnamon buttercream frosting...perfect!

The interesting thing about this cupcake is that it is a vegan cake. I literally told no one this. It's better that way. The icing is not vegan but the recipe on the blog is a vegan recipe, I just changed a few things to make it not so vegan: regular butter instead of vegan butter sticks, and skim milk instead of soy milk. The recipe also says to use between 1-2 tbsp cayenne pepper, so I went to the middle with 1 1/2 tbsp cayenne.

It was about half and half on this one. Half of the people really really liked it, while the other half pretty much hated it. It definitely had a kick to it at the end. I mean, I like spicy foods, always have, so I had no problem with it. A few people that don't like spicy foods (my sister) still actually liked the cupcake, and a few people that don't like spicy foods couldn't finish it. Crazy polar opposite reactions. I'm not sure I'd ever make this one again, but definitely a good experiment. If I did do them again, maybe I'd try 1 tbsp cayenne just to see if that helped the wimps ;)

Cayenne pepper is such a pretty color.

Perfect size. I'm gettin' good at this, guys.

Look at the liners! Dragon skin for Game of Thrones! (ok so it's really leopard...use you're imagination)