Apple Thursday and Macmillan Coffee Morning

Every year my work take part in Macmillan's Worlds Biggest Coffee Morning, and I always like to take part.  Last year, I had the same problem as this year- having more apples than I know what to do with and so I made this apple cake, which I've mentioned before. Although it got compliments, people tended to go for the more decadent cakes.  So this year I decided I need to make something more exciting to stop the crowds going for the shop bought cakes people donate (don't even get me started! I think it should be illegal!).

Just to show you what I kind of volume of apples I'm talking about, The Boy's father decided to come round and pick some of the apples off the tree this week as I never get round to it. After getting rid of the rotten ones, these are all the apples I have in my kitchen at the moment (there are still more on the trees):

Keeping in mind that I had all these apples and that my work colleagues really like their chocolate cake, I decided to make these chocolate orange cupcakes which uses grated apple as a binder. However I let out the marmalade so that they were plain chocolate cupcakes and topped them with some vanilla buttercream and mini oreos.

I chose one of the ugly cakes (I always have a few of them) to test and I'm pretty impressed. I hope they go down well tomorrow.