Guinness & Chocolate Cupcakes with Bailey's Frosting

I first tasted this delicious treat before Christmas. For the last two years the office staff at our apartment complex has thrown a present wrapping party. They provide wrapping paper, serve appetizers, play festive movies, and my personal favorite....they rent a cupcake truck. Yes you read that right. The Cupcakory loads up their cute little food truck, complete with serving window and truck mounted cupcake display case, and hangs out all night to give us cupcakes. IT IS AMAZING!!

Anyway, the purpose of that story was that they had a Guinness and chocolate cupcake that I had to grab for Patrick to try, since he loves all-things Guinness. I don't even remember what I ordered for myself because this cupcake blew me away. This was the most moist cupcake I have ever tasted. That pretty much sealed the deal...I had to try to recreate this cupcake.

While researching my new found food love of Guinness and chocolate in a cake-batter goodness...I discovered that it's called chocolate stout cake and is quite popular. There are few wonderful variations using Guinness (or alike); for example the Irish Car Bomb (with whiskey chocolate ganache filling and Bailey's frosting). YUM!

My take was to make Guinness and chocolate cupcakes with Bailey's Irish Cream frosting. Patrick was FULLY supportive of my endeavors and did not object whatsoever. I was so excited to try out the recipe that I made them the following weekend.

For the cupcakes I followed a recipe I found on Epicurious

The recipe says it makes 12 servings - but it certainly does not. It calls for 4 cups flour, 4 cups sugar, and 4 eggs, etc - that's a lot of cake! 12 servings of ginormous slices of cake maybe. So I halved the recipe, which makes about 24 cupcakes:

Guinness and Chocolate Cupcakes:
1 cup Guinness
1 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup cocoa powder
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 tablespoon baking soda
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

I did not make the icing that the cupcake recipe called for. I wanted something better. I decided to do a twist on my absolute favorite frosting recipe from Magnolia Bakery. It's the same recipe I use when I frost red velvet cupcakes, but I added Bailey's to it. It's wonderfully creamy and not overly sweet, exactly how I like my frosting. Now this recipe makes a lot of frosting. So I made 1/3 of the recipe:

Bailey's Irish Cream Frosting:
2 tablespoons flour
2/3 cups milk
2/3 cups unsalted butter - room temp
2/3 cups sugar
5 tablespoons Irish Cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Follow the creamy vanilla frosting recipe. Let the milk and flour mixture cook for a while and then add the Irish cream before the mixture begins to bubble and get really thick. 5 tablespoons of Irish cream for 1/3 of the recipe was my preference - it's really just to taste. But I found it gave a really nice flavor that wasn't too overpowering. Because of the Bailey's I only used a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla - but again this was just my preference.

Well needless to say these cupcakes were a hit. One of the best, if not the best, I've ever made. So I made them again when I was home from Christmas. I figured I would share the recipe since I had a several requests.

Happy Baking,