Ice cream batter cupcakes with chocolate ganache

As promised in my last post, today I made cupcakes, and the batter was made with ice cream. 

I wish I could say this was all my idea, but it wasn't. I got this from one of the blogs I follow, called Cookies and Cupcakes and specifically from this post. In her post, she uses vanilla cake mix and dulce de leche ice cream. As you might have noticed, I like chocolate, so I used

and a pint of

You simply follow the directions on the box, but omit the water and add in the pint of softened ice cream and mix it all together. Please note, you will want to leave the ice cream out a bit to really soften; if it's still somewhat solid in the center, when you go to mix the ingredients, some of it might just decide to fly up, out of the bowl, and onto everything around it, including yourself. Not that that happened to me or anything...

The instructions on my cake box included bake times for cupcakes, so instead of one cake, I made little ones instead. Then to top it all off, while the baked cupcakes were cooling, I made a chocolate ganache, by mixing 2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips with 2/3 cup heavy whipping cream over low heat, stirring frequently, until it was all melted and combined. I then dipped the tops of the cupcakes in the ganache, swirled them around a bit, and set them to the side.

Viola!