"Irish Car Bomb" Cupcakes

I must say, I was very nervous to make these cupcakes. Terribly, terribly, nervous. I had an awful feeling that - well, that they just wouldn't taste good! Chocolate and Guiness? In a cupcake? I was afraid I wouldn't like them.

I don't think I've ever been so wrong.

Just look at how this amazing recipe by the incomparable Sweetapolita starts:

That, my friends, is 1 1/2 cups of butter melting luxuriously in a steaming pot of hot Guinness. Oh my.

I think I should share the fact that I am not a beer fan, really. The only beer I come close to drinking is Guinness stout, which I guess isn't even really a beer but you know what I mean. Even then, I could never drink more than a few mouthfuls.

All that said, I LOVE cooking with it! It is fantastic in stews, and as I learned today, cupcakes! Who knew?

Well... Sweetapolita knew, I guess. And Amanda at I am Baker where I first learned that such a thing could exist. And the other 1,000 people on the internet who did recipes like this. Oh well, it's new to me.

In any case, back to the butter melting in the Guinness!

Cocoa powder has now been invited to the party. Sift it right in there and whisk until silky smooth.

... Like this! Oh, it looks so silky and delicious! But, it's not yet. Do not try to taste it at this point, there is not yet any sugar in here, and cocoa powder without sugar is bitter as all get-out. I accidentally dripped some onto my wrist when I was pouring it into heat-proof containers to cool (I didn't have a single container big enough for all of it) and without thinking, I licked the hot liquid away.

The very definition of regret, my friends. Eyuck!

While the stout & cocoa mixture is cooling, whisk up all the dry ingredients - flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.

Now, Sweetapolita's blog gives instructions for how to make this cake batter using a KitchenAid mixer. I can only dream, misty-eyed and longingly, of the day when one might grace my kitchen.

In the meantime, my Cuisinart hand mixer did a fine job of blitzing up the sour cream and eggs.

Once the eggs and sour cream are blended, add the cooled cocoa mixture in and mix on medium speed. It is, by the way, tantamount that you cool this stuff thoroughly before mixing it with the eggs, or you may end up with chocolate Guinness scrambled sour cream eggs. Uh, probably not tasty.

Once everything looks smooth, silky & homogeneous, you can start mixing in your dry ingredients bit by bit.

Like so. Be sure to scrape the sides down between additions to ensure a smooth batter.

Now I know I was just saying a couple of steps ago not to taste this stuff, but now that the sugar and all is in there, I had to try. Whenever I make a new type of cake I always taste a bit of the batter before I bake it, and this 100% passed the batter test!

(Legal/responsible blurb time: raw eggs are bad for you. Please don't eat raw batter with unpasteurized eggs in it. Besides, if you don't, it means more batter left for me!)

I wanted to keep the decorating simple on the cupcakes, so I just grabbed this cute cupcake cup & pick set from my local Bulk Barn. Cutest shamrocks ever!

I used my trusty 1-inch scoop and put 2 scoopfuls of batter into each standard cupcake liner. Then bake 'em at 350 degrees for about 18 minutes. I used the toothpick test to make sure they were done when they came out.

These turned out perfectly. Well, very nearly perfectly. I may have over-mixed them ever so slightly due to my lack of incredible KitchenAid stand mixer and guessing on the settings to use on my hand mixer, but oh well. Someday.

For the frosting, I must give credit to my friend Lindsay. I was originally going to do a whiskey frosting, until she put it into my head that a pure Bailey's Irish Cream frosting would go well. So, these consist of the following:

1/3 C of butter, salted (I know, they always say to use unsalted, but trust me on this one.)
3 C icing sugar
1 tbsp Bailey's Irish Cream liquer
2-3 tbsp milk

Just cream the butter with your hand mixer, then gradually add the icing sugar. Once you have little bitty chunks of butter all through the sugar, add your Bailey's, and the milk bit by bit, using your hand mixer set to medium to mix it the whole time. Add only enough milk for it to be of good spreading/piping consistency.

Top with adorable decoration of your choice.

So, is it any good? Well, a new friend at work took a bite, turned to me with wide eyes and breathed, "Oh my gosh, it's like I'm eating a cloud. What is happening?"

She then proceeded to savor every last bite. Everyone who was brave enough to try one enjoyed it thoroughly. I very, very highly recommend these. The sweet and light Bailey's frosting perfectly compliments the rich, deep flavor of the cupcake... you know what? I can't describe it better than that quote did. Just try it yourselves, folks. You will not be disappointed.

Happy St Patrick's Day, folks!

Until next time!

PS: I know that an Irish Car Bomb drink usually involves an Irish whiskey as well, but frankly, I didn't have any whiskey on hand, and I really don't much like the stuff, so I didn't want to buy any! If you are a whiskey fan, just add a teaspoon to your frosting before adding the milk. Either way, enjoy!

A Quickie Cookie Post

Spent over 5 hours baking and packaging cookies today!

My hands are far too cramped* to write up a proper post about it, but I at least want to show a bit of what I've made:

On the right, classic chocolate chip cookies, and on the left their fabulous cousin triple chocolate chip cookies - with white, milk, and semi-sweet chocolate chips! Mmmm.

And here a delicious stack of peanut butter cookies hogs the camera while double peanut butter - that's peanut butter cookies with peanut butter chips added - sneaks up behind for a photo bomb.

I don't think I said peanut butter enough times just now.

Peanut butter.

Shortbread cookies and plain sugar cookies... I was kind of sad that the person who asked for these didn't want any decoration on them! Sugar cookies look so naked with no decorator's sugar or royal icing.

And finally, my very favorite: white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. Oh man, if those nuts weren't so darned expensive I would make these babies all the time. All the time.

Just look at that. It's all I can do not to lick my screen right now. These are just bursting with macadamia nuts and white chocolate. Mmmf!

All told, I baked and packaged 14 dozen cookies today, that's a grand total of 168 cookies in these simple little bags with pretty ribbons. Each variety of cookie has its own colour-coded ribbon too. I'm weird like that.

Now of course, cookie recipes rarely make exactly how many they're supposed to, which brings me to my final point:

Leftovers! Quite possibly the hardest part of making a large order of cookies is not eating them as you go along, especially when they're hot and gooey and aromatic straight out of the oven! Which is why the very best part is the odds and ends left behind when all is said and done.

Once I've delivered the packaged cookies and done some chores tomorrow, I know a couple of friends who will be more than happy to help me 'clean up' these leftovers.

Until next time!

* I mixed nearly everything by hand, with the exception that I used a hand mixer to cream the butter and sugars for the chocolate chip varieties. So yeah, hands = ouch. I'll either have to get used to that or get a stand mixer one of these days!

Let's start things off with a... Failed cake?

Hello all! My name is Tamara and I'll be your Baker in the Basement for the evening.

Or, uh, until I'm done? In any case, moving right along:

I love to bake. It's my one true passion in life. I have just a tad of training from some part-time courses and a lot of home-baking experience, but I'm not going to sit here and bore you with all that. Not this post, anyway.

For this post, I'm just going to say that I live in a basement apartment and I love to bake, and one day I hope to truly claim the title of baker. But for now, here's a cake that turned out all wrong!

This was supposed to look like a big Reese peanut butter cup, as requested by a friend of mine. I should clarify: a friend I've had for over 10 years. A friend who was also my boss at the time since I was helping out with the busy season at the store he manages.

A friend who I right-out slapped because he was bugging me after a long day at the shop. Yup. I felt pretty awful about that and he took advantage of my guilt to weasel me into making this cake. So what went wrong? Well, let's start at the beginning.

Now, I didn't get pictures of mixing the batter (hey, I'm new at this blogging thing!) but that went pretty well. I just altered a yellow cake recipe to include peanut butter - something I'd done a few times before. This time, though, I decided to add peanut butter chips because I wanted to make the cake extra special!

That was mistake number one.

So... first off, right out of the oven, I could see that the top of the cake was a little bubbly-looking... I later realized I had over-mixed the batter. Mistake number 2. But, still, the cake looked moist and well-baked and at this point I thought all was well, until:

Oh, pants. It would not come out of the pan. Both layers were terribly stuck. I'd greased the pans well, I'd baked for the appropriate time, what went wrong here?

Oh... THE CHIPS. They all sunk to the bottom and clung to the pan like vengeful little barnacles. Yay.

Well, I eventually managed to wrench both cakes from their pans relatively intact and trimmed them down to be level.

Once trimmed, I added the first layer of frosting.

I have decided that next time I attempt this cake, I'm going to go with a smoother, glossier chocolate frosting. This cocoa butter cream was a little too rough around the edges.

The next step was to take these little babies and press them into the middle frosting layer, like so:

Now, I'm not going to number this one as a mistake, but I thought these guys were going to be, well, mini-er. So next time I'll have to account for their size a little better - might chop 'em up some so they'll fit into the middle layer better.

As you can see, I had to top it off with extra frosting to level it out.

A LOT of extra frosting!!

Stacked 'em up and slathered more cocoa frosting on there.

Now, I had a vision in my head for the sides of this cake. Nice, wide, vertical furrows just like on the side of a real Reese cup, only bigger! I even had the perfect cake edger in my drawer.

The right size and angle, I knew it would be perfect! If only I could find the darn thing.

To be fair, I did find the right edger. The next day. After the party where I served the cake. So, in the meantime I had to use this less-appropriate edger.

I still got decent striations, but it just wasn't what I'd pictured.

Did my best to smooth out the top, but, again, the frosting wasn't really working with me.

So here she is, complete, a little wonky, and a lot messy. Mistake number - what are we on now?? - was to put this on completely the wrong kind of platter. The edges were raised and it made it practically impossible to get a clean plate edge without digging into and damaging the cake.

So. There you have it.

Now, despite all the little mistakes and mishaps, this cake went over incredibly well. I was officially forgiven for the face-slap. The cake was devoured by all present at the party and the unanimous vote was that it was moist, delicious, and not nearly large enough.

I'd like to make it again, with all the little notes I've made here in mind, and see what I can really do. But that's for another day.

Why did I start this blog with such an iffy post? Such a low note? Because I wanted to show a true picture of where my skill is right now, and that I'm definitely still making mistakes. But mistakes are important! Mistakes are how we learn.

I want to look back at this post sometime down the road, and see how far I've come. I want to figure out how to keep the chips from sinking (tossing them in flour before putting them in the batter has been suggested)  the frosting that will look like real chocolate when it sets, and how to get the perfect furrows up the sides.

And when I can do all that, I'll still know exactly where I started.

Thanks for coming along with me for this journey - it can only go up from here!

Now if you'll excuse me, my banana bread is just about ready to come out of the oven, but that's another post.