Let's Go Back To Easter?

I know, I know. Easter has been and gone. But these cakes were my friend's request for me to make this weekend.

When the cakes (a standard 3 egg chocolate cake mix) came out the oven I was so pleased - the flattest tops I've ever produced!

Bizarrely, last time I made these (you know, for actual Easter) there was only just enough mix to make 12 cupcakes, whereas this time I easily had enough for 2 mini cakes as well. Ho hum, extra cake is never something to complain about! Despite my worries on Twitter...

...they iced up pretty well too...

Mini photo shoot to make out these cakes are more appropriate for Spring/Summer than they actually are...

However, despite their attractive qualities, these cakes have let me down. On the inside, where it counts. They are supposed to look like this...

but today, not so much. They were so disappointing in fact that I didn't even photograph them. I will do - my friend hasn't actually arrived yet so we've only tested one cake so far. I was hoping to get all the photos ready for this post before she arrived. No joy. I will try to update the post with a photo of the inside later on, whether successful or not!

I'm not really sure what's gone wrong with them today. I put some cake mix into the cases first before putting the mini creme eggs in, same as I did last time, but the eggs have sunk completely to the bottom. So much so that when I peeled the case away the, extremely flattened, egg came off with it! Gah. I was so unsure about how these would turn out when I first made them, but after previous success I was quietly confident this time. Oh well, you can't win them all. They still taste nice which is the main thing!

****

A bit later than promised, but this is what the inside of this weekend's batch of creme egg cupcakes looked like...

Not quite the same! The egg completely squished in on itself and sunk right to the bottom - you can see on the bottom of the cupcake the melted chocolate - it broke away from the cake so easily! I did think of the potential problem though. I tend to worry that my cakes aren't going to rise if they use self-raising flour rather than plain flour + baking powder, so as my bag of self-raising flour had been open a while, I also added a pinch of baking powder to the cake mix. Guess that made the mix too light so the heavy frozen creme eggs sank to the bottom. Annoying. Still delicious though - my friend said she too often doesn't like chocolate cake as it can be too dry/just taste of cocoa powder, whereas apparently these cakes were nice & chocolatey :)