Looks Can Be Very Deceiving!

For my next cupcake, I wanted to bake a simple cupcake using some ingredients I already had in my pantry. One being baking cocoa.  I decided I would bake a chocolate cupcake with chocolate butter-cream frosting. I found a recipe on a google search called "best chocolate cupcakes ever".  When I try a new recipe I usually half the recipe because if the recipe doesn't work I didn't waste that much.  I don't know if I didn't half the recipe right or if it was just a bad recipe. My cupcakes came out of the oven unpopped and they looked overdone.  I attempted to redeem them by trying to make an awesome (keyword attempted) chocolate butter-cream frosting.  Hoping they would be at least halfway edible so that my efforts were not all in vain.  Unfortunately the chocolate butter-cream frosting recipe I chose which called for baking cocoa made the frosting taste like a cocoa chalky frosting. Unfortunately this batch only made it to the trash can.  But I thought it took a nice picture.

I don't know if I had a cupcake troll in my kitchen to sabotage all my baking or what today but after my chocolate fiasco, I thought I would go the opposite direction and bake a batch of vanilla cupcakes.  Again, I found another recipe on google that said "the best vanilla recipe" again the cupcakes did not pop up and this time they looked under baked.  After a long day and two messed up batches I figured today was just not my baking day and called it a night.