Mini Doughnut Cupcakes

These are some miniature chocolate cupcakes I whipped up the other day. I call them doughnut cupcakes because I think they look like doughnuts or doughnut holes - with the small round chocolate base, the vanilla frosting, and the colorful round sprinkles. I was making my signature chocolate cake batter for the exhibition competition, but of course I only need to submit three small pieces. I have tried halving this recipe before, which doesn't seem to work out so well, so I made one round cake and used the rest of the batter to make miniature cupcakes. Then I whipped up a small batch of my vanilla buttercream, and used my large open star tip to pipe a swirl of buttercream on each. Then I sprinkled on some colored sprinkles. Because the buttercream icing had already hardened, and the chocolate cake is very moist and sticky, the sprinkles stuck to the cake and not the icing. I liked this effect, the plain swirl of icing surrounded with sprinkles on a chocolate cake.