Bacchanalian Guinness and Bailey’s Cupcakes

One whiff of these cupcakes and you’ll be in Heaven. If you love the smell of Irish cream. Which apparently most of my friends do. These boozed up cupcakes got quite a reaction and I thought I’d share the goodness.

Prepped ingredients for my double batch

I found the Guinness stout cupcake recipe from The Culinary Chronicles. It’s a wonderful recipe, even for a beginner, as it’s easy and can be mixed by hand with a few simple kitchen tools (no fancy mixer needed.) I’ve tried it a few times, once as a double batch, and it has always turned out nothing short of perfect.

The method is simple. Heat the stout and butter in a saucepan. Stir in the cocoa. (I prefer to add the stout mixture to the cocoa in thirds as I find it’s easier to prevent lumps.) In a separate bowl, lightly beat the eggs and sour cream, pour in the slightly cooled stout mixture and then fold in the other dry ingredients. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.

I baked them at 175°C for 16 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the centre comes out with a few crumbs on it. But it really depends on your own oven and how it behaves. No shortcuts here except to get used to your oven’s temperament.

So much butter *faint*

Faux French Buttercream

Now, I’m normally Hopelessly Devoted to Swiss Meringue Buttercream (SMBC). The recipe calls for 5 egg whites per batch and I’m  always flummoxed what to do with the yolks (segue into a bit of irrelevant personal trivia – the smell of raw egg yolk makes me gag.) Now, there are only so many sugee cakes I can make, and so many jars of lemon curd I can use. So about 60 yolks were languishing in my freezer, frozen individually into little yellow stars (the shape of the only silicone ice cube mold I possess. Which I stole from my daughter.)

Then I chanced upon this recipe for Faux French Buttercream on one of my favourite blogs, Brave Tart, which uses up 15 egg yolks per batch of buttercream. Hallelujah! It uses almost the same method as for making SMBC but with egg yolks (defrosted until completely soft, please!) And you will definitely need either a hand mixer or stand mixer.

First, you heat the egg yolks and sugar over a bain-marie (water bath). Watch and stir constantly unless you want sugary scrambled eggs. Then whip it on high speed until it doubles in volume. When the bowl of the mixer is cool (very important!), start adding the softened butter. I suggest you read Brave Tart‘s original post, and watch her video, for the proper details. I added two extra steps. Before heating the egg yolks and sugar, I beat them quite vigorously with a balloon whisk to get rid of as many eggy lumps as possible, I also strained the mixture once after heating the yolks and sugar as I always find little bits of hard egg yolk in the mixture. Could be because I used frozen and defrosted egg yolks. I dunno.

For the Bailey’s buttercream, I added 60ml of Irish cream to half the FFB but you should do it to your taste and smell. When it gets heady and you feel like swooning, I’d say it’s about right 🙂

FFB vs SMBC

My hubby and BFF both prefer the FFB to the SMBC. And they both have excellent taste. I like both.

They can be flavoured with almost anything (fruit puree, jam, chocolate, cream cheese …), have a wonderful smooth texture and freeze well.

FFB is not as sweet as the SMBC. But FFB also takes more than twice the amount of butter (four 250g blocks!) and only makes about 3/4 of the final amount compared to the SMBC. So volume for volume, it is more artery-clogging than SMBC by my non-scientific estimate.

One last word on FFB and SMBC. FFB is really, really yellow on its own. I’ve only used it au naturel so I can’t comment on how well it takes food colouring. SMBC is much paler and can be coloured quite easily.

If you try these recipes, let me know how it goes on my Facebook page, A Bit of Better Butter. I’d really like to see what you come up with!

Happy Baking,

Michelle

An Olde-Fashioned Cake

Last year, I made this “olde-fashioned” cake for one of my oldest and best friend’s birthday. It was a simple vanilla cake with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream, and reminded me of the birthday cakes we used to have as children in the 1970s.

This was also my first attempt at making gumpaste roses and I was so proud of them! They held up really well. The leaves, though, were looking pretty goopy from the humidity, but hey, you can’t win ’em all. I’m pretty tickled to see how amateur my piping skills were. And they still are since I’m much too lazy to practice.

So this year, my friend asked for the same cake. And luckily for you, dear reader, I had the presence of mind to take photos along the way and will show you how I put the cake together.

THE CAKE

I used Nigella Lawson’s ‘Spruced Up Vanilla Cake’ for both cakes. I LOVE this recipe, I cannot tell you how much. It is so simple to make and tastes absolutely heavenly. If you bake it in a bundt pan, as the Domestic Goddess suggests, it make a fantastic eggy tea cake. I’ve also infused it with alcohol (Bailey’s Irish Cream, Kahlua or rum) and served it  with a simple sugar glaze.

I also found it makes a lovely, stable layer cake. I used one and a half times the recipe to make an 8″, three-layer cake.

As the layers were cooling, I was a little worried that the cake might be too dry. I rummaged around my store cupboard and found a  bottle of Bonne Maman chestnut pureé filling which was perfect for making the flavour more elaborate, but without overpowering the vanilla-on-vanilla effect.

ASSEMBLING THE CAKE

Basic ingredients – two or three layers of vanilla cake (I like my cakes small but tall so I usually make at least 3 layers), vanilla swiss meringue buttercream (link is to my favourite recipe from Sweetapolita) and chestnut pureé.

Use a large round nozzle tip and pipe a dam of buttercream near the edge of the layer (to hold the chestnut filling). Spread as much or as little of the filling as you like. I put a fairly thin layer so that it would be subtle. Gently place the second cake layer on top, make sure it lines up more or less with the cake layer below, and repeat. Leave the last layer alone.

Apply the crumb coat to the whole cake (the photo above shows only the sides but the top should be covered too). This is a thin layer of buttercream that seals in the crumbs that may come off the cake and spoil the final “look”. Use a small bowl for the crumb coat buttercream so you don’t accidentally introduce crumbs into your “clean” buttercream for the final coat. The crumb coat doesn’t need to be super neat but I like to make it as even as possible to provide a good clean base for the next layer of buttercream. Also use the opportunity to fill in any holes or gaps in your cakes so you have an even surface. Put your crumb-coated cake into the refrigerator for about an hour to firm up.

Spread the final layer of buttercream. I like to put a big dollop on the top and spread the buttercream with a small offset spatula. But you can also use a small bowl to hold the buttercream or use it straight out of the mixer bowl. Start by spreading the buttercream around the sides and try to get as even a coat as possible. Then spread and even out the icing on the top. This takes some practice and there are lots of good tutorials on youtube to learn from. Even after baking many, many cakes, smoothening buttercream can really frustrate me but I’ve learnt to be more patient, and to decide when good enough is good enough. I’ve also learnt some techniques to camouflage less-than-perfect buttercream (which I may share in a future post).

For this cake, I decided to do a spiral around the cake, a technique I find is pretty, impresses people and hides buttercream flaws. I also piped a row of  swirly things around the base to hide the untidy finishing 🙂 and piped a mound of buttercream on the top to hold the gumpaste frangipanis (plumeria), my friend’s favourite flowers, I’d made earlier. Let the buttercream firm up in the refrigerator for a little while, then take it out at least half an hour before you need to put the flowers in. (Do not put the gumpaste flowers in the fridge as the humidity will make them melt into a sticky mess.)

Here’s the final cake. (I really wish I’d ironed that sarong!)

And here is another photo of the cake with one large golden candle in it:

Photo courtesy of daneshd.com

Hope you enjoyed this post!

Happy baking,

Michelle

Let’s Get Started!

This is my first blog post.

Some of you may have seen my cakes and cupcakes on Facebook at A Bit of Better Butter. I’ve had enough of a positive response to gently boost my ego (thank you all!) But often, I have so much more to say about a particular cake/project that I think may interest others who love to bake. So I’ll use this space to tell you more about the trials and tribulations of my baking adventures.

Let me know if you like what you read, or if you have a particular question about something.

Cheers,

Michelle