St Pat's Cakes

Happy St Patty's Day Everyone!

    There were plenty of things I wanted to make in celebration of today's holiday. However, the NCAA Tournament won out. :) I was able to make cupcakes-- there isn't too much resistance when I declare I'm going to go in the kitchen and whip up some cupcakes. 
    When I went to Target on Wednesday, I made sure to buy some Guinness. Since I don't drink beer, this was purchased mostly with the intentions of baking it into a cupcake somehow--though I didn't think the hubby would object to drinking the leftovers.

    I started out thinking of chocolate, and mostly, what doesn't go with chocolate?? I had a feeling Guinness was no exception. So I set about throwing together a chocolate cupcake batter. And I made sure to add the beer. 

    
    While those were baking and then cooling, I wanted to try my hand at a ganache. 

    The twist was that I wanted to add more beer. Let's just say it wasn't a successful first attempt and move on. Rather than tossing it in the trash (I had used the last of my baking chocolate, and just couldn't bear the thought of throwing away food), I went into resuscitation mode. 


    I poured the mixture that was in my pot into the bowl of my stand mixer. I added confectioners' sugar and turned it on low. After a couple minutes, voila! A nice, smooth, shiny, creamy chocolate "sauce" emerged. 

    This wasn't thick enough to use as an icing...so how to incorporate it into the cupcake scene? Then it came to me. A filling! And that's what I did. Now, I had every intention of making a Guinness frosting to top the Guinness cupcake (mind you, when baking the cupcake and making the frosting, I was conservative with the addition of beer so that the flavor wouldn't be overwhelming) but time got away from me.










    Naturally I had some frosting that needed to be put to use waiting in the fridge. It was a Coca-Cola frosting. (I made this a week or so ago with a different end result in mind, but this was good too.) After filling the chocolate cake with the chocolate sauce, it was then topped with Coke frosting then had a ball of the cold chocolate sauce set atop, then sprinkled with chocolate cake crumbs. 


    OH MY GOODNESS! Everybody, LOOK OUT! This turned out better than I had hoped--and Nate really loves them too. :)

 Yumm!!

Hope everyone enjoyed their day!!