Hummingbird Black bottom cupcakes

I wanted to try another recipe from the first Hummingbird book and chose the Black bottomed cupcakes, coz I'd been so impressed by the one I'd had from the Bakery on my super-brief visit to London back in May. 

Mini-Becca #2 and I had some spare time this morning after chores and before lunch, so got our aprons on and started weighing out the flour and mixing it with cocoa etc.  She helped me whisk together the wet ingredients and add them to the dry - that made a very solid sticky mixture, most unlike any other recent recipe we've done.  Nonetheless, having double-checked the recipe in case I'd made a mistake (I hadn't) we soldiered on.  She licked the beater arms and I spooned the mix into 15 midi cupcake cases.  We then quickly washed some items and made the cheesecake section of the cupcake mix.  It, on the other hand, was very very runny.  Again, following the recipe I added about a tablespoon to each cupcake and put them in the oven.  Upon removal 20 minutes later, they looked like this...

Which isn't a bad way to look, but not much like the picture in the cookbook.  The consistencies of my component mixes caused this look, but I'm not sure what caused the consistency issues.  No big deal, they tasted good anyway.  Not as chocolatey as I remembered, and when I queried this on the Bakery's Facebook page they suggested that I didn't use the same ingredients, so it wouldn't taste the same.  Fair comment, really.  Me and Mini-B declared them yummy anyway!