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Okay, these were pretty delicious. Moist cinnamon cake, a surprise swirl of chocolate and cinnamon sugar in the middle, and chocolate ganache frosting to top it off. How could it be bad? The answer is, it can’t be bad.

The original recipe by Dorie Greenspan was for a whole cake, and you can find it on page 210-11 of Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan. However, in a effort to save some money on ingredients and to stop my waistline from expanding even more, I halved the recipe and made some cupcakes. I just could not bring myself to take out 10 tablespoons of butter for one cake this week.

I really love cinnamon, and this was the cinnamoniest cake I have ever made. The batter seemed pretty standard and it was simple to make, the only substitution I made was that I used low fat buttermilk instead of whole milk.

To make the cupcakes, I scooped a bit of batter into each cupcake cup, sprinkled the cinnamon, sugar, espresso powder mixture over the batter, then topped it with some more batter. The only tricky part was figuring out how many cupcake cups to fill halfway. I ended up having to abandon one half filled cup to fill up the others. I ended up getting 8 cupcakes out of a half recipe.

I let them cool overnight and frosted them the next day. The chocolate frosting couldn’t be easier to make. Chocolate + butter + double boiler = delicious ganache frosting. This frosting did set very nicely after about 2 hours. I was pleased.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have had a bit of an upset tummy for the last few days so I only ended up eating 1/2 of a cupcake just to try it. They were great. Nick, Geoff, and our friend Nick of Macheesmo all gave them a thumbs up. The rest go off to work today with Nick.

I read on the P&Q that some people were not fans of the cinnamon chocolate combination. I suppose I don’t eat such a combination too often, but it was fabulous in this recipe. Just the right mix of comforting laid back buttery cake and chocolate decadence. However, I would totally eat this as a coffee cake with no frosting, and just the little secret punch of swirly chocolate in the middle.

Many thanks to Tracey of Tracey’s Culinary Adventures for picking this fab cake for all of us to make. Check out the Tuesdays with Dorie blogroll to see what the other bakers thought.

(How great is that swirl?)