Ultimate Chocolate cupcake

Do you read recipes with just a touch of skepticism? I got this recipe for the ULTIMATE CHOCOLATE CUPCAKE 3 years ago. Yeah, sure a lot of hoopla for just a cupcake. WELL! I would be hard pressed to come up with a better recipe for a chocolate cupcake.

This is how mine looked, yes, they are all gone. I invited 2 friends over and I took 2 to my exercise class, my kids, husband and I; everyone agrees these are great cupcakes.
I found the recipe in my Cook's Illustrated magazine June 2010...but I also found them here! Oh, I did not use coffee, just hot water worked fine.The frosting I used is different but the cupcake is the same. And her picture is better. I'm warning you, do not make a single batch of these. 12 cupcakes is not enough to be able to give very many away.

There is a longer story....
Two weeks ago I NEEDED a recipe for meringue cookies, I have one I've used before in my Joy of Cooking which we liked BUT I vaguely remembered reading about a way Cook's Illustrated cut down on the sugar so I went looking for the recipe. Hours later I had looked through all of my issues of the magazine and had not found it. So last week I decided to make an index of all Cook's Illustrated recipes into Excel so that I could find a specific recipe easier.1100 entries later I was finished, and I found 3 copies of the meringue cookie recipe . Then I needed to put the magazines into chronological order so that I could find a specific magazine. While doing that I took a red pen and put a small check mark next to the recipes I had tried.

That was an accident! I had not tried the Ultimate Chocolate cupcake recipe. Now I didn't want to lie on my magazine, or cross it out so I had to try it. Enter the search for one of the ingredients; Dutch Process Cocoa. Nobody had it. I tired 2 Krogers, Target, Spec's, called *HEB, Randall's and a health food store. No luck. I checked Amazon; I could get it BUT I thought $15 was a little steep plus shipping. So Monday I called Whole Foods in Houston and they had it. Really, I managed to stay away for a couple days but Wednesday I drove 35 minutes, one way to get this:

Then yesterday I was at our mall, 15 minutes away and found that William Sonoma carries dutch process cocoa too. It was almost twice as costly but I would not have had the drive....Oh, well I enjoy Whole Foods and I found 2 other elusive ingredients for recipes I wanted to try.

*Visited HEB 2 weeks later and they had some dutch process cocoa. Did they get it because I called, or did they have it and I just got someone on the phone that couldn't read?