Starbucks Peppermint Mocha Cupcakes with Two-Tone Frosting Swirl

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Even within the seemingly narrow category of chocolate mint, there's quite a range of flavors and styles. These chocolate mint cupcakes have coffee flavor added to them, to make a tasty reminder of our favorite winter time Starbucks drink! And don't let the fancy color decoration fool you, that effect is actually quite easy to make – well at least she makes it look easy on camera.

Let's take a look and find out how it's done.

The way to make these cupcakes is pretty typical. Mix together the dry ingredients. Then mix together the wet ingredients. Then combine to make the cake batter. In this recipe we'll also be using brown sugar, which is not typical as far as other recipes I've reviewed.

The dry portion of these treats contain espresso powder (not eXpresso! lol), and the wet portion of this recipe contains brewed coffee. There definitely should be a distinct coffee flavor when finished baking.

Place everything in muffin tins, and bake at about 300 degrees for about 20 minutes, depending on the size of your cupcake muffin tin and how hot your oven gets. Look, there's the coffee below in this screenshot!

While that's baking, it's time to prepare your two-toned frosting. Buttercream frosting is quite simple – add butter and confectioners sugar, then beat together. Some buttercream recipes use cream cheese and/or milk as well. The gal making these cupcakes just list it as an ingredient to purchase, so you can choose to either make yours, or get the vanilla stuff pre-made like in the video.

Since we're going to take time to make a pretty swirl, you can cheat for this recipe and just buy it 🙂

For making the two-tone swirl, get two types of gel (green and red). They're clearly placed in some kind of liquid, which I assume is water to make them more paintable. Then just start at the cone-portion of the bag and paint up, in a straight line.

Fill the bag with cream carefully to not mush the lines in too many directions. She doesn't mention how to refill the painted lines, but I assume that the color will only last so long. I guess you will just use the bag until all of the buttercream is gone, then re-paint, and refill. Experiment and find out!

As you squeeze out the cream, it will turn green on one side, and red on the other. If you have different colored peppermints, you could also try different colors. These days candy canes come in all colors, so decorating with mini candy canes with special colors could also be a great way to garnish.

For the full list of ingredients and instructions, go to Cookies Cupcakes & Cardio. You can also watch the entire video below to get a better idea of the baking and frosting process. These Starbucks-themed chocolate peppermint cupcakes will be a hit at your next Christmas party, or any event!