Stout Cupcakes

Are you sensing a theme? I know I am. What theme do you ask? Alcohol, that's what. The sticky toffee pudding cupcakes I made last week required brandy. The stout cupcakes (no recipe on Martha's site) this week required beer. Since last week's cupcakes turned out so well I was slightly optimistic that I would like these cupcakes. However, if I was a frequent drinker of alcohol, beer would not be my first choice, and since these cupcakes contained beer, I wasn't overflowing with hope.

My level of knowledge when it comes to beer is just slightly superior to my knowledge of liquor, so it is fair to say that I don't know much. Thankfully, the recipe suggested that Guinness would be a good choice for these cupcakes, so Guinness is what I chose. It of course had to be the most expensive choice. Then again, only the best will do. True story, I once made penne a la vodka with Grey Goose. Call me crazy (it's okay, my entire family did when I told them), but it was the only vodka we had in the house! Plus it was a gift and roughly 1 year and some odd months later it's still in the freezer. Anyway, back to the beer... I (Bobby, since he was funding this particular grocery trip) bought a 6-pack of Guinness. I only needed about 1 1/2 bottles. So if you're thirsty we've got some in the fridge for you. Right next to the Grey Goose.

While I am an alcohol novice I do know that there is a special way you're supposed to poor Guinness (right?), and I think it's supposed to settle a little bit too before you drink it. I could be wrong. Either way, the first thing I did before working on any other portion of the recipe was pour the beer into a glass so it could settle. While the Guinness did its thing I combined the dry ingredients. I also zested an orange so I wouldn't have to do that later. After all the dry ingredients were combined I put all the wet ingredients together in a large bowl. In the midst of doing this I came upon a moment of uncertainty. While measuring the amount of beer that I would need (1 1/4 cups) I wasn't sure if I should measure from the top of the foam or the bottom. I decided not to count the foam and measured 1 1/4 cups of beer sans foam. This may or may not have been the right decision. Once all the ingredients were in the bowl I turned on my hand mixer and proceeded to make a mess. There were so many liquid ingredients I knew I was going to have a bit of a sloshy mess when it came time to use my hand mixer and I was right. I did my best to contain it and a majority of the splatter landed on my t-shirt (not a problem since I was wearing gym clothes) and not on the walls or countertop. Win. I combined the wet and dry ingredients with my hand mixer and had myself Pyrex-pourable cupcake batter!

The only thing better than Pyrex-pourable batter is not having to butter and flour cupcake pans. I have finally come to another recipe in this section that allowed me to use cupcake liners. How I've missed them so. A little sneak preview for you... I get to use them next week too. Hooray! I filled the cupcake liners three-quarters full and had myself 28 cupcakes, just like the recipe said I would. The cupcakes baked for 20 total minutes with a turn halfway through the baking time. They were perfectly baked.

The stout glaze for these cupcakes was very simple, it only had 2 ingredients. Confectioner's sugar and you guessed it... more Guinness! 2 things that just came to me... I feel like I should have made these last week for St. Patrick's Day. And, when I took Rollins to the vet this week (nothing to worry about, just a couple booster shots for the standard doggy vaccines) there was another dog there named Guinness, and he was brown. I digress. Back to the glaze. It was very easy to make, but I was a little concerned that it was going to taste too much like Guinness for my preference. Crisis averted. It didn't really taste anything like Guinness. I know what Guinness tastes like because I tried it while making the cupcakes. It is not good. How people willingly drink it I'm not sure I'll ever understand. While I didn't enjoy the Guinness itself, I did enjoy the cupcakes. They're reminiscent of a spike cake, or molasses-type baked good. Right up my alley.

Chewy Molasses-Spice Cookies

These cookies are one of the newest additions to my Christmas cookie cast (yep, just made that up on the fly). I made these for the first time last year and enjoyed them myself, and also received a good response from family and friends so I decided they could make a repeat appearance this year. I like to try to get a good variety of flavors, I don't want everything to taste the same, and these have a nice little kick to them. A little bolder than a gingerbread cookie, which is also part of the Christmas cast. You'll meet them soon. Don't worry.

My recipe for these Chewy Molasses-Spice Cookies comes from, you guessed it, Martha. There is no holiday she doesn't touch. This recipe is in the same little book where my Snickerdoodles recipe can be found. I've used that little cookbook quite a bit and all thanks to my college roommate who got it for me when she was interning for Martha's show. I know, I wasn't that jealous of her at the time, but looking back, I should have had her get me a lot more swag and maybe a job. Hindsight.

There isn't much to this recipe, the worst part is the time it takes to roll the dough. A majority of the cookies I made this year required the dough being rolled into balls and then rolled in sugar. It's a lot of rolling that can get quite old after you've baked several dozen cookies. I'd much rather be rolling in dough than just rolling it. Get it? Just me? Fair enough. Hope you enjoy.

Chewy Molasses-Spice Cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp salt

1 1/2 cups sugar

1 1/2 sticks (12 Tbsp) unsalted butter, room temperature

1 large egg

1/4 cup unsulfured molasses

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with rack in center. In medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. In a shallow bowl, place 1/2 cup sugar; set aside.

2. With an electric mixer, beat butter and remaining cup of sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg and then molasses. Reduce speed to low; gradually add dry ingredients, beating just until dough forms.

3. Using 1 level tablespoon per cookie, roll dough into balls. Then roll each ball in reserved 1/2 cup sugar to coat.

4. Place balls on baking sheets, about 3 inches apart. Bake one sheet at a time, until edges of cookies are just firm, 10 to 15 minutes (cookies can be baked 2 sheets at a time, but they will not crackle uniformly). Cool 1 minute on baking sheets; transfer cookies to wire racks to cool completely.

Ginger and Molasses Cupcakes

I have baked with ginger before, but not fresh ginger. I've baked with the kind of ginger that's dry, comes from a small container and costs about $7 (why are spices so expensive?). Fresh ginger is not ground up and dry, it doesn't come from a small container and doesn't cost $7... unless you buy a lot of it. I will say that due to the amount of work fresh ginger requires I prefer the $7 container, but I was happy to finally try using fresh ginger in a recipe.

When shopping for this recipe fresh ginger was the only thing I needed to buy (hooray!). Though I'm a fresh ginger novice when it comes to baking or cooking with it, I know what it looks like and felt confident I could find it at Stop and Shop and not have to make a bunch of trips to various grocery stores. I was right. Yeah me. The recipe said to buy about 2 6-inch pieces of ginger to yield what I would need. I bought 1 large and 2 small pieces thinking it would equal what I needed. I probably could have weighed it to see if it was the number of ounces the recipe specified, but that would have been a smart decision. Smart decisions are things I don't always make.

When it came to prepping these ginger and molasses cupcakes I started with the ginger. First I peeled all the pieces and tried to remove the "nubs" to make it easier to peel. Then, I minced. I actually looked up the difference between mincing, chopping and dicing (love me some Google) so I would now exactly how small the pieces of ginger were supposed to be. I assumed mincing was the smallest because I didn't think having giant chunks of ginger in these cupcakes would be very good. I was right again. I am on a roll. And, in case you're curious in terms of size of the pieces of whatever you're working with, from smallest to largest it goes minced, chopped, diced. You're welcome. Back to mincing. It was fairly easy to do, some of the pieces of ginger were harder to chop than others, not sure why, but overall it was a pretty painless, though sticky process. In an exciting not normal turn of events my eyes proved to be great measuring cups this time around because I got the perfect amount of ginger that I needed for the recipe. Chances of that ever happening again... 1 in never.

The rest of the recipe was easy, except for one minor hiccup. Before going grocery shopping I checked my molasses supply to make sure I had the 2/3 cup that was necessary. I looked in the cupboard, and the jar looked to have enough molasses. Of course when it came to measuring out the molasses while preparing the batter it turned out that I didn't have enough. Using my perfect measuring-cup eyes I concluded I was a little less than 1/4 cup short. Crap. I was tired and now annoyed, I had already worked all day and I didn't feel like making a trip to the store for one thing. I did think about it for about a minute and then decided that being roughly 1/4 cup short of molasses was not a crisis and couldn't possibly make that much of a difference.

During the baking time I added 2 minutes to the total time since these weren't quite done after 20 minutes. When I poked them with the toothpick after 20 minutes I still had batter on the toothpick and the middles sunk in a little. After a little more time in the oven they were fine. When I tasted them I didn't notice anything missing due to the small amount of molasses that I didn't have. Then again, this was the first time I tasted them so I didn't really have anything to compare them to. Ignorance is bliss!

As many of the cupcakes so far in this project have been, these were topped with whipped cream. I made the whipped cream while the cupcakes were baking since it's so easy and put it in the fridge in a Ziplock bag until I was ready to frost the cupcakes. When it was frosting time I noticed that the whipped cream had become a little liquidy (may or may not be a real word) even though I left it in the fridge. I decided to re-whip it in my stand mixer to get it back to the consistency that I wanted. Worked like a charm and I was proud of my head's-up thinking. I did forget one thing. To garnish the cupcakes with the $7-container ginger before I served them and took their pictures. Next time I'll remember the garnish and I'll have the required amount of molasses... unless I forget.