our very first barn dance...

The Arcata Marsh, one of the places I volunteer (and love to visit!), had a barn dance last night as a fundraiser.  They needed people to bring baked goods to sell so naturally I jumped at the chance!  I decided to make chocolate surprise cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies.  I made a half batch of this chocolate cake recipe, which made around 20 cupcakes.  Then I used the filling from this recipe.

 I like this filling because it doesn't have to be piped in, you just put a layer of cake batter, a dollop of filling, and then I do just enough batter to cover the filling.  It cooks with the cupcake so its not gooey, but just a cream cheese flavoring-delicious!

To coat the top of the cupcake, I didn't want to use frosting since these are already rich enough so I just smoothed the top with chocolate ganache (basically just melted chocolate with some cream and butter or shortening) that semi-hardened.  The end result tasted a little like a Hostess cupcake!

I made royal icing flowers to top the cupcakes.  I make the flowers in large batches and then just save the rest for whenever I need them.

I thought they turned out really cute and I just put them in a fold-over baggie with a white ribbon for the bake sale!

Dano came with me to drop the goodies off and we stood around debating if we should actually go in and participate.... We figured we would be the youngest people there and it would be sort of lame.  Well, we were very wrong.  The place was completely packed and it was quite an assortment of kids, young adults, middle agers, and kind of just a smattering of older folks.  The place was so lively and everyone was dancing, laughing, having a great time! 

Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and just might keep our eye out for the next one ;)