Preview: Chocolate cupcakes with cherry buttercream

Excitement! My new Metro Design Beater Blade Model KA-5L arrived from Amazon today. I use a KitchenAid liftbowl mixer (though I really wish I had the tilt head ... anyone want to buy a mixer?), but the beater blade doesn't hit the sides and bottom very well.

Enter Beater Blade and their blades with little squeegees attached to the edges. This enables the beater to effectively scrape the sides of the bowl, so you're not stuck scraping them down manually all the time.

And to me, that's exciting.

So the first thing I'll be making with my new toy is this week's Cupcake Friday treat: chocolate cupcakes with cherry buttercream. I had thrown a bunch of crazy flavor ideas out to my taste testers earlier this week, but then I figured I should back it up and nail a standard cake flavor while playing around with adding stuff to the buttercream. For this particular frosting, I'll be using the leftover store bought cherry fruit butter that my friend Jen brought over to serve with her AMAZING sour cherry scones and apricot scones. The woman is a scone genius.

Until Friday...