Chocolate Orange Cupcakes with Orange Cream Cheese Frosting

I went nuts playing with frosting, and not in a good way. It's not as easy as I thought it'd be. I squirted some frosting out trying to draw a circle...and my circle got disconnected all the time, my frosted cupcakes looked pretty...pathetic! We all had a lot of fun though...SC, myself and my helper each got to frost at least a cake...and here are the horrible ones we did...

I did the horrible circles (they were meant to be "roses", but I failed miserably) and the wobbly heart, my helper did the "flower" with just four petals (she meant to draw five petals but somehow overestimated the space heheheh) SC did the star and...

....the Chinese character which could be interpreted as "yum" (jeng!).
How creative of him!

I also did a little smiley face...which also meant that this cake had too little frosting, too bad!

I used recipes from all recipes, I just reduced the portion to eight cupcakes, added a teaspoon of orange essence in the cake batter (recipe link here), as well as a teaspoon of orange essence and a drop of orange food coloring in the frosting batter (recipe link here). The chocolate orange cupcakes turned out wonderful, chocolatey and moist, the frosting gave a delightful tang to the combo. I'll be making these babies often ;)

Speaking of writing with food...it all started when we went to a Japanese BBQ joint for a lunch and SC wrote the same word using thick, juicy, tasty ox tongue chunks.

He said that this should be every food blogger's favorite word, yum!
I couldn't agree more ;)