Peppermint Bark...cupcakes?

Another holiday staple has to be peppermint bark. I absolutely love this stuff, or really anything with peppermint and chocolate, around the holidays. Since I'm not really a chocolatier, I'm not so confident in my chocolate manipulating abilities, so I tend to stay away from making anything chocolate. 

This year I'm going to have to learn to get over my fear of working with chocolate, slowly. I took baby-steps with this one, and simply decided to translate the candy into something I could bake instead. So I took out my favorite red-velvet cake recipe from SmittenKitchen, which for me doubles as the perfect cocoa-powder based chocolate cupcake without the red. I added another 4 ounces of melted semi-sweet baking chocolate and went with it. The frosting is just whipped cream with a bit of vanilla and peppermint extracts. I topped them with some crushed candycanes for the full effect. For this one, I only used about two-thirds of the sugar and I substituted the buttermilk with regular whole milk. 

Just think crushed candycanes on top.

For me, the added chocolate doesn't really do that much for the cupcake as a whole. I think the chocolate flavor is more pronounced, but not overwhelmingly so like I had hoped. Luckily though the addition doesn't do anything bad for the texture. The cupcakes turned out incredibly light and still rather moist.