Car Bomb Cupcakes

In the past few weeks, I have been craving for cupcakes... specially those from Kara's Cupcakes. Although they were super duper delicious, I started to wonder if it made sense to spend $3 per cupcake – so I decided to make some myself. Since both Porgy and I are self-professed alcohol lovers, I used this Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes from Smitten Kitchen - it's an intepretation of the Car Bomb drink in a cupcake form. It was my first time EVER making cupcakes and I am not much of a baker so I followed her direction to the T.

However, if I ever make this again, I would cut the Ganache filling in half to avoid having too much leftover at the end or maybe substitute it with some Salted Caramel filling to cut the richness and add some saltiness. I also had some difficulties with the Bailey's Buttercream icing. Who knew that making icing was that hard... I think my mistake was that I didn't let the butter warmed up enough to the room temperature. And since I sucked big time with the piping works, I used a couple of small spoons to drop a dollop of icing on top of each cupcakes. I think they still look pretty darn cute, don't they?


Ingredients:

The Guinness chocolate cupcakes:
1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

Ganache filling:
(already cut to half the amount in the original recipe)
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoons butter, room temperature
2 teaspoons Irish whiskey (I like it strong)

Baileys frosting:
3 to 4 cups confections sugar (I used almost 3.5 cups)
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
4 tablespoons Baileys

Directions:

Follow the direction at Smitten Kitchen since she's the pro.