Friendship Friday :D

Ok. So for those that don't know what Friendship Friday is; Friendship Friday is when the Seniors in English Literature go down to the Special Ed classes and we take the challenged kids (our age) around and come up with fun things for them to do that get them out of that classroom and make them feel like they're normal. Now personally, I adore mentally challenged people. Oh. And old people. They're hilarious and they are such characters. Just not a lot of people want to give challenged people a chance because they don't know how to relate to them or what to say. Well, some of them, you just treat like you would a child and others, you can talk to like you would anyone. They're just a little bit slower in processing information than you. So anyways, I love Friendship Friday. And for our first one, I wanted to make a good impression. So I decided to try out  a recipe I found online. It's called Double Chocolate Marble. And lemme tell you, it tastes ah-mazing!  This is the recipe:


Ingredients: 
6 eggs
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup (8 oz tub) sour cream
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (I use Hershey's)
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
Dowel sticks or tooth picks
--------
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup sugar


Ok, well, that's all you need. There is a line between those two parts so you don't get confused, even though I'm certain you already are. :P  The 1/3 cup cocoa and etcetera is for the marble effect. Don't add it into the other mixture. I'll explain how this works. I didn't take pictures of the actual making because my camera was dead. So I apologize but, I will be taking pictures when I make my friend's eighteenth birthday cake this weekend and I will take pictures when I make the Fall cupcakes. I hope that will make up for it. 
At first, pre-heat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease (I use cake release by Wilton) and flour a 10-inch round cake pan. Or in my case, a silicone cupcake tray. Then you can start making your marble effect mixture. Take everything that was listed under that line (cocoa, and sugar) and combine it. Separate the eggwhites from the yolks. The recipe says to go ahead and beat your eggwhites and then to set them aside and I did, but by the time I was done with everything else, they had started to get liquid-y again. So I suggest holding off on that. With the mixer, mainly because I don't know anyone that can do this by hand, cream your room-temperature butter with the 1 cup sugar and brown sugar. Beat in the egg yolks and add the vanilla and sour cream. In a different bowl, stir the flour, cocoa, salt and baking soda. Beat into the creamed butter mix. Then in a large bowl, beat the 6 egg whites until they are stiff (fluffy and not runny) and stir in about 1/3 of them into the batter to lighten it. and then fold in the rest gently. But make sure it's folded in well. Put a little in your pan of choice (cake or cupcake), maybe about a fourth of the way to the top. Then get a spoon and sprinkle some of your marble effect mixture on top of that. Add some of the batter, then the powder mix, and so on with the layers, ending with the batter. Get a dowel stick or a tooth pick and swirl the cupcakes or cake but DO NOT STIR. Bake at 325 F for 105 minutes (1 hour and 45 minutes) or until it's done. 


So that's how I made my cupcakes. Well the base anyways. I also made butter-cream frosting. Both regular and chocolate. It tasted pretty great. But I messed up and got my measurements confused and I put too much Crisco in it. So when they got warm from being  out of the fridge. The frosting started separating. Which looked funny. But they still tasted pretty epic. (: I think this is now my favorite cake type. (:

This is what the cupcakes looked like after the frosting decided to be mean. My camera had been dead so I didn't get a picture of the before.

This is my buddy from Friendship Friday. I had to blur out his face. But that's him. He's pretty awesome. He loved the cupcakes. He nommed on them pretty fast. We played soccer, visited teachers and ate cupcakes (:




-you know I'm sugarlaced-