St. Patrick's Day Part II

True to my/our word, I made Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes tonight so I could try getting buzzed off of cake.
In the course of gathering ingredients and such, I discovered I am a squirrel yet again:


On the left: the existing cupcake liners in my pantry. 

On the right: the package of cupcake liners I bought today because I couldn't remember if I had any.

My cupcake pan is AWOL so I just put the foil liners on a baking sheet:


Right. On to assembly!

The first thing you do is stir a cup of Guinness and a cup of butter together in a pan which is kind of weird but okay.

Looks scary.

Then you measure out cocoa powder

And add it to the simmering fatty-Guinness:

And you whisk it until it looks like pudding, which it almost is:

I have no pictures of the rest of the batter assembly but you basically beat eggs and sour cream, add the fatty-chocolate-Guinness mixture to make what is essentially Guinness chocolate pudding (minus the sugar), then add flour and sugar and baking soda and suddenly it's not scary chocolate beer pudding anymore, it's cake batter.  

The one thing I did differently from the smitten kitchen recipe was to decrease the sugar from 2 cups to 1 2/3 cups, because seeing "2 cups flour" and "2 cups sugar" together in a cake recipe is terrifying.

Anyway this is what the cupcakes looked like naked:

I used a clean cheapass vegetable peeler to core the cupcakes:

You can see clear down to the bottom!

There were 24 cupcakes, but only 23 made it to this stage. One got kind of smushed during the transfer to cooling racks. Sad.

Here are all their guts.  I ate them, as it was my perogative.

I was expecting the cupcakes to be quite dense and rich due to the heaviness of the beer and all, but the texture turned out to be light and fluffy, and they all had perfect lightly crisp tops. They were quite chocolatey without being too rich, because the Guinness added body and flavor.  I didn't miss the 1/3 cup of sugar I left out (but then again, I like semi-sweet chocolate so your mileage may vary).  I would totally make these again any day of the year (except maybe tomorrow).

But enough about the cupcakes themselves, let's keep violating them!
In order to do it properly, I needed whiskey and dark chocolate ganache. Here is a picture of Nick's bottle of whiskey that I borrowed:

Here is a picture of a lovely tempered chocolate ganache with cream and butter and Jameson in it. It's about half Valrhona, half Toll House, because I was too lazy/cheap to run out to a fancy food store to make up the difference in nice chocolate.

Nick thinks "ganache" sounds like an STD.  Say it out loud.

The resulting pile of reamed cupcakes, filled with ganache.  Ewww.

Foreground: the large freezer bag I sacrificed in the name of ghetto piping technique.

Alas, I have no pictures of the finished cupcakes, since final assembly was done at Emily's. It's easier to transport a bowl of frosting + tray of unfrosted cupcakes than it is to wrangle 2 dozen frosted cupcakes into a car without making a mess.  

I am hoping Emily took a photo, but for now, just imagine the cupcakes topped with a thin layer of white buttercream with a shot of Irish Cream in it, because that's exactly what they looked like before we ate them.

The ganache was quite alcoholic and I think I got buzzed from eating two.

TAKE HOME LESSON: Pastries are a prime vector for alcohol delivery, if you are a wimp like me who can't metabolize alcohol.