Brownie Cupcakes

I had too much coffee today (no, that had nothing to do with the Stumptown), so I was wide awake at 11 p.m. looking for a project. I settled on mini cupcake brownies, which I'd been researching all day.

I settled on this well-received recipe on epicurious.com: Brownie Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting. I followed the basic recipe, but I made some significant changes so I'm sure my end result doesn't taste much like what you'd get if you followed the recipe exactly. My changes:

• I don't own a kitchen scale, so it's hard for me to guesstimate ounces. Instead, I used 1 3/4 cups of chopped up chocolate. I tried to chop the pieces into roughly the size of chocolate chips, and I used Trader Joe's 73% dark chocolate instead of two different kinds of chocolate. I melted one cup with the butter in the beginning and saved 3/4 cup to stir in towards the end (you'll see what I mean if you read the recipe).
• I used 2/3 cups walnuts instead of 1/3
• I added a teaspoon of baking powder with the flour because the comments on epicurious.com said the brownie was extremely dense and I just wasn't in the mood for that. Plus, I'm giving a lot of the brownies away so I wanted them to be poofy and cupcake like, not sunken in the middle like storebought mini brownies. The baking soda made it rise quite a bit, but it was still more brownie than cake. Next time I'd use 1/2 a teaspoon.
• I added a tablespoon of my homemade Grand Marnier to the liquid. A little booze never hurt anyone.
• I used mini cupcake tins instead of regular sized cupcake tins, but it still took at least 15 minutes to bake all the way through. Check for the cupcakes to look very inflated and dry in the center before you start doing the toothpick test. I sprayed the cups with oil, dusted with flour, then inverted to knock out excess flour.
• Because I added so many things to the recipe, I had too much batter to fit into my 24-cup mini cupcake tins. I just baked the leftovers in a greased ramekin.

But my favorite alteration is this: after filling half the cups with regular walnut brownie mix, I added a generous pinch of ginger powder and half a teaspoon of ground cardamom to the rest. Spiced brownies are a love of mine. I studded the regular ones with walnut and left the spiced ones untouched. I put together a box of zuchinni muffins (whole wheat, low sugar, recipe courtesy of Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything), regular brownies, and spiced brownies.