Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

For St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to make cupcakes. I had picked up some fantastic shamrock sprinkles and some St. Patty’s Day cupcake cupcake cups and I was determined to use them. In the true spirit of the holiday, I decided to make Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes and had found this recipe by David Lieberman (because it was the first Google hit). However, I didn’t have everything that I needed for the recipe I found so I had to do some alterations and tweaking.

Piglet’s Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes

Makes about 30 cupcakes.

Ingredients

2 cups of all-purpose flour
2 cups of sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup of unsweetened cocoa powder (I use Ghiradelli)
1-1/2 cup of Guinness (or I suppose another stout beer could replace)
1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
2-1/2 sticks of butter, melted
1/2 cup of buttermilk
3 large eggs

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. In a big bowl, mix all the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and cocoa. Use a whisk to really get them mixed up until they are fairly homogeneous.

3. In your mixer bowl (or just another bowl if you use a hand mixer), mix Guinness, butter and vanilla. Mix for just a bit.

4. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing in each one thoroughly before moving on to the next.

5. Add the buttermilk and mix until smooth. There may be some chunks left from when the stout and butter mixed, but as long as they’re fairly small, you should be okay.

6. Line your cupcake tins with cupcake papers. Fill papers 3/4 full. They won’t overflow, but they will be nicely domed.

7. Bake for 18 minutes, rotating halfway through if your oven doesn’t cook evenly.

8. Let cool for about 5 minutes (or until you can touch them) before gently popping them out.

9. Frost and decorate!

I made some vanilla buttercream frosting which I dyed green and piped that on. Then I dusted with some cocoa powder and added the green shamrocks. The cupcakes were very moist which was great with just a slight hint of the beer taste. You knew it was there, but it wasn’t overpowering. The buttercream frosting tasted good with it although I would have preferred something a bit stiffer just for the shape of it. But I would consider it a success: they disappeared at work and I even had people coming asking me if I had any leftover that I could bring in since they’d heard how good they were.

More pictures after the break.

A close up of my lovelies.

Ready to go to work.