Week 16: Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting



Peeps eye Carrie B.'s tasty Guinness chocolate cupcakes.

Hi all!  Its Carrie again, and this week’s cupcake challenge was the Guinness chocolate cupcake with cream cheese frosting.  I was really excited to try baking with Guinness.  I’ve used Guinness before for savory stews and soups, but never for sweets.  Luckily, my husband is a huge fan of Guinness so he helped put away the Guinness I didn’t need for the recipe.  (Thanks, Travis!)

I thought this recipe was pretty easy, particularly in comparison to the filled cupcakes.  I used room temperature butter, cream cheese, and eggs rather than cold.  I read in my Bon Appetit magazine this weekend that room temperature makes all the difference.  I also sifted the dry ingredients together to avoid clumps before mixing with the wet ingredients.  Overall, the batter was thinner than the last cupcakes I made, and, therefore, a lot easier to pour into the cupcake pan.  Oddly, there was a difference in the cook time between the foil cupcake wrappers and the papers ones.  (The paper took longer.)  I have no idea why.

This Peep may have had one Guinness
(cupcake) too many.

Overall, I would definitely make these again.  The cake is not too sweet—almost like a dark chocolate—and you can’t really taste the Guinness.  And, once again, I’ll eat anything with cream cheese frosting on it, so load it up.  I played with the idea of adding a few big chocolate chips to the top of each cupcake as a garnish, but decided against it.  I thought I would stay pure to the recipe before adding my own things to it.  In the future, though, I might be throwing on some chips, or perhaps a raspberry to cut the sweetness of the frosting.  I don’t know, I’m just brainstorming.

I give these a big thumbs up.