Chocolate Stout Cupcake with Kahlua Frosting

 

I must confess: for the longest time, I have a prejudice towards cupcakes. I find the frosting too sweet, and the cake itself very bland. That is, until I did a "tasting" for a girlfriend of mine's baby shower. I sampled 4-5 stores' cupcakes, and oddly, I realized, not all cupcakes are created equal. (Duh....should've known that a long time ago, but how can I never make that connection?)

Fast forward to St Patrick's Day, and I was sitting around reading recipes online for fun. Yes...i do that, though I also often lacked the motivation to get over the "activation energy" to actually make something. Anyhow, I saw this interesting recipe for chocolate stout cupcake with chocolate ganache filling and Baileys frosting. And I went.....how can a cupcake be SO complicated?! It's so complex that I got curious enough to actually want to try making it myself. I mean.....first of all, having beer in cupcake is an interesting idea. Secondly, the ganache filling part is just unthinkable (for lazy people like me, that is). And lastly, more alcohol to top it off in the frosting?!?! I'm just SOLD!

So off I went to my neighborhood Trader Joe's to get a bottle of stout, hoping that I can find some idling bottle/can sitting around for me to scoop up. Because, to tell the truth, I'm not a beer person (not yet, going through my beer education slowly, but that's a different story). And in particular, I'm not a stout person. Anyone ever tried a shot called Irish Car Bomb? I hate that drink, not to the point with a passion, but I'd only take it if someone is some serious salesperson. 

Back to my cupcake venture, I spotted a bottle of "chocolate stout", all the way on the top of the shelf at Trader Joe's. That also happened to be the ONLY non-pack-packaged stout in the entire store. So I figured, how lovely, chocolate stout in a chocolate stout cupcake. This cupcake is just getting more and more chocolate in there. 

The ordeal of making cupcake, took me 2 days (I did it in stages, since I got lazy). The first day, I made the cupcake, and the ganache. I cored the cupcake, and filled the ganache in there. And ate ALL the cake pieces with my friend. Then the second day, I made the frosting, piped it, and immediately delved into one of them. 

How is it? It's AMAZING!! Everyone just loved this cupcake! Though given the intensity of work involved, you better be a really special person for me to make that for you again. I did, however, after the experience, invested in a cupcake corer from Amazon, to save myself some trouble in the unforeseeable future.

The recipe was originally posted on Smitten Kitchen, which I made generous modifications to, based on ingredient availability and personal taste. One thing for sure, I cut sugar, both in the cake and also in the frosting. 

Chocolate Stout Cupcake with Kahlua Frosting

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen's Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcake

Yields 24 cupcakes

Ingredients:

For the cupcake:

• 1 cup stout
• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocao powder
• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 tsp salt
• 2 extra-large egg
• 2/3 cup sour cream (room temperature)

For the chocolate ganache filling:

• 8 oz bittersweet chocolate chip (buy the best you can, gourmet baking chocolate makes a HUGE difference)
• 2/3 cup heavy cream
• 2 Tbsp butter (room temperature)

For the kahlua frosting:

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 3 Tbsp kahlua (coffee liqueur)
• 1 Tbsp heavy cream
• 1/2 - 1 cup* confections sugar

To make the cupcake:

1. Preheat over to 350F. Line muffin pan with cupcake liners.
2. In a small saucepan, bring stout and butter to simmer over medium heat. Add cocao powder and whisk until fully incorporated. Cool to lukewarm.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. 
4. With a electric mixer, beat together egg and sour cream. Add the cocao mixture to the egg mixture, and mix to combine. With mixer speed on low, slowly add the dry ingredients into the batter, and finish it by hand folding the dry ingredients in. 
5. Divide the batter among cupcake liners, and bake for about 24 minutes.
6. Once the cupcake is done (toothpick comes out clean), cool on rack completely.

Note: A few things different from the original recipe:

• Since I only have 1 muffin pan, I baked my cake in 2 batches separately. As a result, I did not rotate the pan half way through the baking process
• The original recipe calls for baking time of 17 minutes, but my cake was not done at that time, so I had to adjust the baking time accordingly. I think the reason for the time difference could be from the extra-large eggs that I used (instead of large eggs, the author used). The extra liquids resulted from the size difference could potentially play a role in the time difference

 To make the ganache filling:

1. Place chocolate in a large heatproof bowl.
2. Heat the cream in small saucepan until simmer, and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for a minute and stir with a spatula until smooth.
3. Add butter and stir until combined.

To fill the cupcake:
This can be done right after making of ganache, while waiting for it to cool. The goal is have the ganache filled while it's still soft, but not too hot to handle.

1. Use an 1/2 inch cookie cutter (or cupcake corer!!) to cut the center out of the cooled cupcake. The cut should not go deeper than 2/3 of the cupcake.
2. Remove the cut pieces (and you can start munching on them)
3. Put the ganache into piping bag (or zip-lock bag with corner cut) and pipe the ganache to fill up the cupcake

Note: 

• If you're like me, who normally don't start baking till 7-8pm at night, this will be a good point to take a break and call it a day. Because, by now, it'll be about 10-11pm already.  
• Coring the cupcake turned out to be harder than I thought, as the texture of this cupcake is rather soft, so it might be easier to just not be as greedy (i.e. not going as deep) when you make that cut. Having a cupcake corer should speed things up a lot, thought I'm not sure if spending $4-5 for yet another gadget is a good idea until you have actually lived through the pain of coring 24 cupcakes.

To make the frosting:

1. Whip the butter with an electric mixer until smooth. 
2. Slowly add the confections sugar into the butter, a few tablespoon at a time.
   I actually taste along the way, and stop when I think the frosting is sweet enough, which is where the variable amount of sugar I called for.
3. Once the frosting is sweet enough, and frosting looks think enough to spread, drizzle in the kahlua and heavy cream.