Nuggetty Goodness

Add flavourings of your choice. The pics are matcha in the batter, and chinese preserved sweet salted plum powder in the custard.

Muffin base

Ingredients

Flour 200g (AP, bread, cake, all will work)
Almond meal 50g <-- this is to boost the fat, don't leave it out
White sugar 150g
Baking powder 1tsp
Salt 1/4 tsp

Thickened cream / whipping cream 100ml
Fresh full cream milk 200ml

Crafting

1. Dump dry ingredients in bowl and stir till more or less the same
2. Dump cream into dry ingredients, mix into pastey doughy thing (can still have bits of flour, it's fine)
3. Dump milk in 50% at a time, mixing in each time. (But don't overmix, just like... fold it lazily. Lumps are fine.) You're looking for a very thick milkshake type batter, so we wanna control the liquid to make sure it's not too ... liquid.
4. Fill cupcake cups to about 5mm below the edge. Alternate filled/empty bits in muffin tray for best results/most even heating. If you're using those fancy tall muffin cups like I did in the pic, still go 5mm~ just below where it'll start to leak. The fancy muffin cups are GREAT if your oven (like mine) heats unevenly. They seem to shield the cupcackles and make them come out more symmetrical.
5. Pop in 180C oven and bake for 30m~ (tops should start to be golden brown on the sides)

If using coconut cream to replace thickened/whipping cream, the texture will be more dense. But still nice!

Microwaveable custard-filling base

Ingredients

1. Dump corn starch and sugar in mug
2. Stir to homogenise
3. Dump a bit of milk (enough to make a paste to avoid lumps)
4. Stir into said paste form
5. Add the rest of the milk, stir
6. Nuke for 2 minutes, stirring every 30s, until the custard thickens. at 1m 30s, you may want to change to nuke for 15s rather than 30.
7. When it looks thick and gloopydrippy and not-set-custardy, it's done
8. Shove in fridge to cool for a couple hours (I usually leave it overnight so I can bake the next day).

Now, I'm sure someone who can actually use icing properly would get a better result... but these can be a proof of concept! XD

So come forth, O you icing people! Make better ones!

The usual disclaimer: I don't really measure stuff very exactly. I tend to eyeball, and go by ratio. What this means is if you have a bit more or less of any one part, as long as it's reasonably close, everything should be fine. I'm using grams, but really... if you look at it, it's parts vs parts. XD

Note that because I'm lazy, and made equal batches of white and brown bits, there will be about 4-5 cupmuffins that are just dark brown left over. I stuffed cherry jam and a frozen cherry into those... but they're fine plain, too!

Ingredients
Makes about 12 cupcakes... but it's a bit weird. More on that in the actual recipe below...

For the white bits...
200g cake flour
25g sugar
50g butter
1 tsp baking powder
Vanilla essence
125ml milk

For the brown bits
200g cake flour
25g cocoa powder
25g sugar
50g butter
1 tsp baking powder
Vanilla essence
115ml milk
10ml very dark strong coffeefeefee

For the face bits
Pink icing (nose and mouth)
White icing (Eye whites)
Brown / chocolate icing (for sticking on the ears)
Mini chocolate chips (Irises)
Chocolate Melts, cut into quarters (1 chocolate melt = 4 ears)

Craft the kittehs!
Preheat oven (non fan-forced) to 180C.

White bits

1. Dump dry ingredients in food processor
2. Whir around in food processor for a bit, if you're too lazy to sift. I never sift. XD
3. Cut the butter into vaguely cuboidal shapes
4. Dump butter into food processor too
5. Whir stuff around in food processor until the mix looks kinda coarse and you mostly can't see any butter lumps anymore
6. Dump white bits in a bowl
7. Make a well in the white bit dry ingredients
8. Dump vanilla essence into milk, stir until you can't see the essence anymore
9. Dump vanilla-essence-milk into well you made in white bit dry ingredients
10. Fold white bits into milk stuff until just combined. The consistency you want is thick, almost-becoming-liquid paste, sort of like a very rich, thick shake. The kind that is a bit of work to suck through the straw. So add milk until you get that consistency. 125ml is just an eyeballing figure...
    

Brown bits
Really, this is the same as white bits except that you have the coffee. XD

1. Dump dry ingredients in food processor
2. Whir around in food processor for a bit, if you're too lazy to sift. I never sift. XD
3. Cut the butter into vaguely cuboidal shapes
4. Dump butter into food processor too
5. Whir stuff around in food processor until the mix looks kinda coarse and you mostly can't see any butter lumps anymore
6. Dump brown bits in a bowl
7. Make a well in the brown bit dry ingredients
8. Dump coffee and vanilla essence into milk, stir until you can't see the essence anymore
9. Dump coffee-vanilla-essence-milk into well you made in brown bit dry ingredients
10. Fold brown bits into milk stuff until just combined. The consistency you want is thick, almost-becoming-liquid paste, sort of like a very rich, thick shake. The kind that is a bit of work to suck through the straw. So add milk until you get that consistency. 125ml is just an eyeballing figure...

Assemble the face-base

1. Fill half the cupcake cups (around 9 of them) with white bits. If you have more left over after 9, by all means fill more... but I didn't.
   
2. Use a teaspoon (or something else small) to get the brown bits that will be behind the grumpy eyes. Use a smaller blob than you think will be needed, as it'll spread a bit when baking.
3. Plop vaguely semicircular brown bits side by side onto the white face base.
4. Repeat until you run out of white face bases.
5. Plop leftover brown bits into the other cupcake cups. You should have something like 5 brown cupcakes, and 7 catcakes. The catcakes will be smaller than the browncakes.
   
6. For the pure choc cupcakes, I filled half the cup with the batter, plopped some jam in the middle (about half a teaspoon), plopped a frozen cherry on top of that, and then covered it with the other half of the batter.
7. Shove in oven and bake for 25m or so. Or until the usual stab it with a toothpick and the toothpick comes out clean happens.

Put the face on the base

1. Let the face bases cool for about 30min or so - you can eat the pure chocolate ones first though! ;) There's a reason they don't even show up in these photos...
2. Pipe the nose and mouth with pink icing - I used the normal 'line' type nozzle.
3. Pipe the eyes with white icing using the ummm 'flat' type nozzle. Hopefully better than I did...
4. Stick a mini chocolate chip into each white icing eyeball to make the iris.
5. Cut a chocolate melt into 4 quarters - I used a butter knife.
6. Pipe some chocolate icing (again using the 'line' type nozzle) on each side of the face, roughly where you think ears should be, and of roughly that length. This is the 'glue' for your chocolate melt ears.
7. Stick chocolate melt quarter onto the chocolate icing... ears!

That's about it really.

The rest is optional, and involves cackling, and pretending to be a zombie, and making cats say sad things as you eat off bits of their heads...

ヽ(”`▽´)ﾉ