Okay, after an impromptu leave of absence which I spent enlightening young minds, I'm back. And I have a new goal. A close friend of mine (my husband's best friend's girlfriend) is obsessed with cupcakes. Not in a bad way, but she loves them. Passionately.
We began holding cupcake baking nights at my house as a kind of girls' night bonding time while the boys played an online game with each other-- this new game called Aion. As recovering WoW-heads, apparently, this new game is good-- which means E and I babysit each other. A lot.
So 2 weeks ago, we made an attempt at Guinness cupcakes with Bailey's frosting. (Sounds tasty,
right?)
I've made them before, (picture above)but the recipe was on my now-dead computer and I didn't have time to make it up again.
So, we used Martha Stewart's recipe from her Cupcake Book. The recipe is pretty much a spice cake with a guinness glaze (right). That is almost nothing like the cup
cakes I made back in
March. Those were chocolate Guinness cake with Bailey's buttercream frosting. Oh well, we made them
anyway. They were alright, but I was disappointed in the lack of chocolate.
So last week, we decided to stick with a booze trend and we made "Smudslide cupcakes" (The term "smudslide" came from a drink-a-day-athon in which a mixed drink was made for each day of the week-- for example, "Margarita Monday" Sunday was a really hard day of the week to assign, therefore, "Smudslide Sunday was born")
Our Smudslide cupcakes were delicious!! We decided that we are going to make a cookbook dedicated to cupcake versions of alcoholic drinks (and possibly with alcohol still in them...)
Our cupcakes had coffee, Bailey's and coffee liquor in them along with a LOT of dark chocolate. Once baked, they deflated like sad soufflés... This may have been due to the amount of time that the batter sat around while we made things that we hadn't anticipated. Like coffee. I had the GENIUS idea to make french press coffee so it would be strong and delicious and add LOTS of flavor to the batter. This, of course, meant boiling water and then steeping the coffee and THEN finally(!) adding it to the batter...
The silver lining to our concave cupcakes was that the indentation allowed more frosting to be added to each cupcake. Which, by the way, also had liquor in it. Our frosting was basically a buttercream base with melted dark chocolate, coffee liquor and Bailey's added in for deliciousness. They look fine, right?
Rich and decadent, I do not foresee an end to this escapade any time soon. Next on our list is Blackberry Cabernet cupcakes... stay tuned!
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