Post - St. Patrick's Day Shenanagans: Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes

Greetings, everyone! I got back from Florida last week, and I felt super-refreshed (especially since the weather has also been nice here in Virginia Beach). But now, the weather has cooled down, and I am not well. Bleh. But I was still able to make some cuppin' cakes for St. Patty's Day this weekend. Even though I did not partake in the massive amounts of green beer, I made a batch of Irish Car Bomb cupcakes-- Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's buttercream.

I found this recipe at instructables.com, which was an adaptation of a recipe from Smitten Kitchen. The ingredients are as follows...
For the cupcakes:

• 1c Guinness beer
• 1c butter, melted
• 3/4 c cocoa powder
• 2 c flour
• 2 c sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 3/4c sour cream 

Preheat the oven to 350 and line your cupcake pans (this recipe is good for about 28). Melt the butter in the microwave then add to a large bowl. Add the Guinness and the cocoa powder to eh butter and mix well.

A little extra step at this point would be to enjoy the rest of the beer (or in my case, I had my Betrothed take care of it).

In a separate bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt.Then stir in the eggs and sour cream. Add the chocolate mixture and mix well.

Spoon the batter into the cupcake pans. I actually had a bit of extra batter that I poured into a 6" pan. Bake all for about 17 minutes.

For the Bailey's buttercream, I mixed up my basic vanilla buttercream recipe and added an entire mini bottle of Bailey's (of course you can add more to taste, but make sure your buttercream isn't too soupy!). The Bailey's mixes well by hand, so no need to bust out the Kitchenaid if you already have some vanilla buttercream lying around.

A bit of shamrock sprinkles and voila! (what would be the Irish equivalent of that...?)

Once these were baked, the Guinness flavor was hard to find. However, this recipe makes delicious, fluffy chocolate cupcakes! I think next time, I could add a Guinness glaze or use the Jameson whiskey ganache filling from the original recipe, just to give them a little kick.

Bowling Party Cupcakes!

Hello, all! I made these cuppin' cakes this past weekend, but I haven't had the time to blog about them until today. I've been freaking out/ planning/ getting excited about my trip to Florida for the next week! My Betrothed and I are renting a car and road-tripping it down to Clermont to spend some time with family. I'm so excited because we haven't visited in almost five years! Also, this will be the longest road trip I've been on, so I'm super-nervous!

Anyhoo, I made two dozen bowling ball cupcakes for a birthday party this past Saturday. It just so happens that the US Open of Bowling was also this past weekend. It was actually pretty interesting because the bowler that won (Pete Weber) was creating quite a stir. But, I digress!

I started with baking 12 yellow and 12 chocolate cupcakes (the other two dozen went tightly wrapped in the freezer for snacking). My client requested purple bowling balls, but I didn't want to make them just solid purple. I wanted them to look marble-y, like real bowling balls.

So I started with a lighter purple on each cupcake and gave them a rough smooth (heh makes sense but doesn't at the same time)

Then I mixed the remaining purple with even more purple and squiggled the darker purple onto each cupcake.

So to get the marble-y effect, I used a spatula dipped in hot water to smooth it over and make it round and bowling ball-like.

After repeating that 23 more times, I added 3 black dots to each ball and patted it down with a wet finger. And voila!

The kids loved the cupcakes at the party, and I heard that there were none left!

So, my lovely readers, I will be on hiatus for a little while. Time to pack up my shorts and bathing suits and head on down to Florida for a much-needed vacation! Perhaps I shall bombard you with stories and non-confectionary pictures when I return mwahahaha!