Recipe Review: Neopolitan Cupcakes

Last weekend I saw these here Neopolitan Cupcakes floating around Pinterest:

So I just had to try them. I have to say this concept is awesome and these cupcakes are nearly as good as they sound! In this case, you make one cake batter, then split it in three. One-third remains good old white cake, one-third get some strawberry, and one-third gets some chocolate. Great in concept. Only one glitch in execution…the cocoa powder for the chocolate batter makes it SUPER thick. I added some extra milk to help thin the consistency, but my chocolate cake still came out very dense. The strawberry and regular cake baked up fine.

My cupcakes:

The frosting is made the same way, one batch of buttercream is divided in three and strawberry is added to one-third, cocoa powder to one-third and the remainder is left vanilla. Similarly, the cocoa powder made my frosting REALLY thick. Also, I had to add extra cocoa powder and milk/cream to make the frosting taste chocolately and be a workable consistency. See, in this case the base buttercream frosting has significant vanilla and trying to taste chocolate over that vanilla is tough!

So overall, these cupcakes were TOTALLY edible and yummy, and my coworkers devoured them with no problem. Adding strawberry jam to make the strawberry batter and frosting worked great and this is definitely a trick I’ll use in the future! However, next time, I’ll make a separate chocolate cake batter to get the right cake consistency and also a separate chocolate buttercream.