Chocolate Guinness Cupcakes for St. Patrick's Day 2023

 It's a good thing everybody's Irish on St. Patrick's day because we love to celebrate. We decorate a little bit and I set the table with a festive shamrock tablecloth. As I get older and more family members are missing I find that I enjoy these low-key smaller holidays more than days like Christmas, New Years or, God forbid, birthdays. 

This year our menu included Guinness beef stew, sauteed green cabbage and potato "farls". Dessert was Chocolate Guinness cupcakes with Guinness buttercream. I used this recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction and I'm just going to go ahead and say that they were absolutely scrumptious. I wish could have eaten several!  The recipe calls for reducing most of a bottle of Guinness to use in the batter and the frosting. That was my first time reducing beer, and with this kind of stout it made for a bit of a bitter reduction but of course once coupled with all the brown sugar in the batter they balanced each other out wonderfully.  It was also a chance to use some of my espresso powder, and I have a lot left over still. The recipe yields 16 cupcakes. They didn't dome at all in the oven, which is fine. 

I halved the buttercream and had just enough to pipe a bunch of shamrock decorations and frost 6 cupcakes. That's all I wanted anyway since I planned to freeze the rest. I mostly followed the buttercream recipe but added less chocolate powder and less espresso powder, and a tad more milk and vanilla than it called for. In retrospect I wish I'd also thought to add malt powder, which would reallly have elevated these. I frosted the cupcakes with a big blob from a 1/2 inch round tip and then placed them upside down on parchment paper to firm up in the fridge. I'd seen this technique online and really liked the smooth flat top it yielded. You quickly figure out how much frosting to put on and how hard to press the upside down cupcakes. Piping the buttercream shamrocks took many tries. I used Wilton tip 104 for most of them and it took my hand some practice getting the swooping motion to make the heart shapes for the leaves and connecting this into a shamrock shape. I piped one larger shamrock using an open star tip and really liked that one, but as the frosting got softer I started having trouble with it,  so only got one large shamrock. The stems were piped with Wilton tip 3 and pressing down a little  to get a bit of the flattened look that I ended up preferring to a rounder stem. I have a few more shamrocks in the freezer now. We'll see how they survive being jostled in there and if there's another use for them.

After all the work and such a complete meal it was lovely to go for a walk in the neighborhood, enjoying the fact that it stays light until after 7 pm now. 











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