Pioneer Woman's Chocolate Cupcakes

I love the Pioneer Woman, (for those of you who don't know who she is, she was a city girl who fell in love with a real, live cowboy and now she lives on a ranch with Marlboro Man and their four kids, blogs about it and has a cookbook) all of her recipes are delicious and what we call 'cowboy food' which is short for 'the most decidedly NOT low cal food of the sort that cowboys eat due to the extremely demanding physical nature of their work.' These cupcakes are no exception. In fact, I ended up making full size cupcakes as well as mini ones for a 'healthy' option; the idea being that instead of having a big cupcake you eat a mini one or two and are satisfied, in practice the mini ones were excellent snacks in between big ones. Being healthy is overrated anyways.

Start by mixing together your dry ingredients.

Next mix together the buttermilk, eggs, baking soda and vanilla. Note the old pyrex measuring cup, it is now in pieces in some landfill due to an unfortunate accident and we haven't been able to find a replacement, so tragic.

Then melt the butter and add the cocoa powder and water, to make a sort of hot buttered cocoa, not that you would want to drink it, what with the two sticks of butter in there.

Add the chocolate mixture to the flour mixture and stir it up, at this point it looks kind of like a lovely brownie batter.

Next add the buttermilk mixture and stir it up, but don't mix the hell out of it, you wouldn't want your cupcakes to get tough.

Then, spoon the batter into your prepared muffin tin. I have been having troubles with my muffin tins lately and should have probably put those paper liners in them instead of living on the edge and just greasing them. I paid for that mistake when I couldn't get them out of the pans and nearly had a mini breakdown (I ended up popping the pieces from the worst cupcakes into these silicone muffin molds my lovely cousin gave me, and the cake was so moist and lovely it sort of smushed back together). Anyways, drop a hershey kiss in the center of each one before you pop them in the oven, don't press down in it, just let it sink on its own.

Bake and then let cool. Once cool, you can frost them with the delicious ganache, I am sorry there are no pictures of the ganache being made, I was far too busy taste testing it to make sure it was just right and forgot. You will just have to make them and see for yourself. The recipe can be found here.