Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes

This year, I was not called upon to make 300-plus cupcakes for the Girl Scout troop's Princess Tea Party. I found a couple of boxes of cake mix left over from last year's extravaganza and decided to use one of them to make a treat for this week's PLTI class. These cupcakes are made from a devil's food cake mix, a can of cherry pie filling, some almond extract, a couple of eggs, and some chocolate chips.

Cherry pie filling is pretty nasty, acrid stuff, although the nastiness is mitigated somewhat if you happen to find a couple of cans of it for 99 cents each on the grocery-store closeout rack. For the frosting, I followed the Anne Byrn's recommendation for the Martha's Chocolate Icing. It's a cooked frosting (sugar, butter, and milk heated until the sugar melts, then combined with chocolate chips). I made a double batch of it and used some to glaze the Chocolate Syrup Swirl Cake for Lost Lunch Thursday.