Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

  Scary Halloween Mummy  Chocolate Cupcakes Halloween is such a favorite holiday of mine! No stressful and obligatory family gatherings, dressing up in costumes and lots of sweet treats. What's not to love?  This year I decided to make Chocolate Cupcakes  for us to enjoy and just to spread the love.  I used  this recipe  from Sugar & Sparrow's blog. I followed the recipe and the batter was so liquid and barely filling the cupcake wells in half. Although the recipe says it makes 15 cupcakes, each portion just looked so scant I ended up dividing the batter among the 12 cupcakes in the pan.  Well, that showed me!  These cupcakes really rise and some of them turned out pretty big.  Next time, I'll make 14. I'd planned to do a simple "mummy" decoration with the frosting, so it really wasn't a problem that some of them were so domed. The strips of the mummy's wrapping are done with a basketweave piping tip done in a bit of a random pattern...

 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...