Cupcake Wars Part 2

Ok, so...yesterday I made those delicious cookie dough cupcakes. My taste for experimentation was not quite satisfied yet, though. Evan and I went out to the store and got the supplies for some yummy chocolate stout cupcakes. I used a couple of different versions and combined them.

I had a lot of trouble with this one. I've never really made cupcakes 100% from scratch, but I felt it was necessary for this one. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail because it literally took me all day to make these and the mess in the kitchen is still waiting for me...

I had fun with this but I have to say I won't be making these again anytime soon. I used Guinness Extra Stout in the batter (8 oz only, not the whole bottle, which made Evan very happy since he got to drink the leftovers) along with some butter, cocoa powder, sour cream (I know...it didn't sound right to me but it was good, trust me!) and the usual suspects in the baking department.

This was a very dense batter and I was kinda worried about it not getting cooked all the way through so I'm afraid to say that I may have over-cooked them just enough to make the tops all crusty. :( Sad panda for sure.

However, Evan didn't seem to mind once they were all put together.

I used a glaze recipe from my new favorite site: The Cupcake Project

I didn't have a very good experience with this however. I really don't know what I did...things turned out to be much runnier than I wanted and they also didn't taste quite as much as like the stout as I wanted. However, I tried to doctor it a bit but I failed. I failed miserably and it made quite a mess. I made it work as well as I could, but they were not up to my standards.

After I exhausted myself to no end with that debacle, I chose to make an Chocolate Irish Cream Buttercream frosting for little blobs on top of the glaze. This stuff tasted amazing. All I did was take store bought buttercream and add a bit of Bailey's Original Irish Cream and cocoa powder in there.

Please, don't tell me that they look like poop blobs. I already know that...

I sprinkled a bit of cocoa powder on top of it to make it look a little more refined and I think I made them decent.

According to Evan, they were much better than I thought they were going to be. I'm not sure if he was just telling me that or he was being honest, but I really needed to hear that after about 5 hours of struggling in the kitchen.

I guess the only way to decide if they were really truly good or if Evan was just flattering my ego is to send them to his office and let them decide. While I'm at it, I might as well see what they thought of my cookie dough cupcakes, too! :) Looks like his office is becoming my test market for my baked goods.

Hopefully they don't mind. Tune in later for the results in Cupcake Wars Part 3!