Week 4 - Frosting/Filling - Chocolate Avocado Cupcakes with Avocado Frosting

I have always made my own frosting. I can't stand the stuff in the can.  But, I have a pretty standard recipe and I don't mess with it very often.  For this week's challenge I'd had designs on doing eclairs or something else fancy, but we have guests in town and it's been a busy week so I chose to go a bit more low key, but new.  I present: Chocolate avocado cupcakes with avocado frosting. 

The avocado in the chocolate cake part is mixed in with the liquid ingredients.

The batter was far thicker than I am accustomed to with cake batter, but I also forgot that I replaced the vanilla extract with scraping out a vanilla bean.  Even so, I don't think the 1 tsp. of vanilla would have changed the consistency that much. 

The recipe called for the muffin tins to be filled most of the way up rather than the normal half full.

I wish I'd filled them up even a bit more, so they would pop up over the cupcake tin, but they cooked up just right and I couldn't wait for them to cool so that I could make the frosting and taste these suckers!

Making the frosting was pretty easy - just mashing the avocado really well (I used a combo of a handheld mixer and then smashing with a spatula against the side of the bowl),  then mixing with vanilla and powdered sugar. The avocado essentially replaces the butter.  In addition to making a new frosting I've never tried, I also busted out my piping bag and got some practice with that.  I am not great at it, but it was pretty and I like how they turned out aesthetically. 

My wonderful in-laws and my wonderful husband were my guinea pigs and humored me by trying my creation.  The verdict was that the cupcake combo was good - not amazing, but good. We all agreed that doing either the chocolate avocado cake or the avocado frosting would be enough - this combo was a bit of overkill.  In the future I'd pair the chocolate avocado cake with a lemon frosting, or a simple buttercream, or perhaps even a whipped cream frosting.  The avocado frosting could be paired with a nice lemon or white cake.  

 It was fun to try out something new.  And it was in no way a bust - there was nary a crumb left, so it was certainly not disgusting. :)