These cupcakes are da bomb!

This past Sunday we went over to my Mom & Dad's house for dinner. Since it was close to St. Patrick's Day, I made the Irish Car Bomb cupcake recipe that I found on the Smitten Kitchen website. Jeeesus, Mary & Joseph! (as my Irish Grandmother used to say) They were the best cupcakes I have ever tasted! Made with Guinness Beer and Bailey's Irish Creme, they seemed like the perfect sweet treat for this time of year.

(food photography is not my thing...sorry for the blurriness!)

If there is any part of you that loves chocolate and the taste of Bailey's Irish Creme, I urge you to make these cupcakes as soon as you possibly can. Although, I have to disclose that since the recipe makes 24 cupcakes, you may want to wait until there are people around so that you don't find yourself eating all 24 yourself (which I would have happily done if left to my own devices. Luckily I froze 6 of the cupcakes & gave the most of the rest away. Still, I have managed to eat 4 of them in the past 48 hours & it will be a miracle if the last cupcake survives until Mr. Crackers gets home tonight!)

Here's the recipe (from SmittenKitchen.com)

Makes 20 to 24 cupcakes

For the Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes:
1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

Ganache Filling:
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter, room temperature

Baileys Frosting:
2 1/2 to 3 cups confections sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, at room temperature
3 tablespoons Baileys

Special equipment: 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer and a piping bag (though a plastic bag with the corner snipped off will also work). I used an apple corer with great success!

Make the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners. Bring 1 cup stout and 1 cup butter to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Cool slightly.
Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt in large bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sour cream in another large bowl to blend. Add stout-chocolate mixture to egg mixture and beat just to combine. Add flour mixture and beat briefly on slow speed. Using rubber spatula, fold batter until completely combined. Divide batter among cupcake liners, filling them 2/3 to 3/4 of the way. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, rotating them once front to back if your oven bakes unevenly, about 17 minutes. Cool cupcakes on a rack completely.

Make the filling: Chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream until simmering and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute and then stir until smooth. (If this has not sufficiently melted the chocolate, you can return it to a double-boiler to gently melt what remains. 20 seconds in the microwave, watching carefully, will also work.) Add the butter and whiskey (if you’re using it) and stir until combined.

Fill the cupcakes: Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped (the fridge will speed this along but you must stir it every 10 minutes). Meanwhile, using your 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer, cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes. You want to go most of the way down the cupcake but not cut through the bottom — aim for 2/3 of the way. A slim spoon or grapefruit knife will help you get the center out. Put the ganache into a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top.

Make the frosting: Whip the butter in a bowl with a hand mixer, for several minutes. You want to get it very light and fluffy. Slowly add the powdered sugar, a little bit at a time.

When the frosting looks thick enough to spread, drizzle in the Baileys (or milk) and whip it until combined. If this has made the frosting too thin (it shouldn’t, but just in case) beat in another spoonful or two of powdered sugar.

Ice and decorate the cupcakes.

As I said before, your final step will be quickly give as many of these away as possible, or you will find yourself barricaded in your own kitchen speed eating them until you are no longer able to button your pants.

And now, in honor of St. Patrick's Day, I will share with you one of my memories of my Irish Grandmother. (I should probably preface this story by saying my paternal grandparents had 12 children - and that is bound to do something to a person. I myself probably would have gone completely insane when faced with that many children to raise.) Although I don't think she was even five feet tall, my Grandma was a force to be reckoned with. To a child of 7 or 8, she was downright fearsome - not at all the prototypical warm and fuzzy grandma.

"Do ya want to play a game with me Karen?"(this in itself should have been a clue that something strange was coming. I think this was the only time she ever uttered that sentence.)

"Sure Grandma, what do you want to play?"

"It's a game I call 52 pick up. Do ya want to know how to play?"

"Yeah" (I swear I have always been incredibly gullible. I had no idea what was coming next.)

"OK. Here we go" she told me as she threw an entire deck of cards up into the air.

We both watched as all 52 cards fell down onto the floral carpeting in the living room.

"Now ya get pick 'em up." she said with a gleam in her eye as she turned and left the room.

I'll tell you something that I learned at an early age. Do not mess with the Irish.

More chocolate please....

Today was a cold, windy and snowy day. A kind of day that makes you want to put a fire in the fireplace, stay inside & bake something. Something chocolatey and delicious. Something like brownies! Mmmmm, brownies.

Now, I will admit here that I am a bit of a snob about brownies. Not so much of a snob that I won't happily eat any kind of brownie set in front of me (except for those blondie things. I'm not sure what they are, but I know they are certainly not brownies!). But, I am enough of a snob that I refuse to make brownies from those mixes you can buy at the store. Making brownies is so easy from scratch, it seems kind of silly to me to make them from a box. Of course even while I am saying this, I will admit that if the box brownies tasted like my favorite recipe, then I would happily make the ones from a box.


My main hang up with the brownies out of a box is the fact that instead of using butter (mmmm......butter!), they use oil. I know you think I'm nuts, but I can taste the difference, I really can. And here's the thing. I have a love affair with butter. I come by this love honestly. I come from a long line of butter lovers - going all the way back to (at the very least) my great grandma, who ate massive quantities of the stuff. I figure since she lived to the age of 93, I'll take all the warnings about trans fats with a grain of salt & indulge myself in this 1 vice.

Oh, butter, how I love thee...

What was I talking about again? Oh yes ...brownies!


I thought I'd share my favorite recipe since it's so easy. It's actually from inside the box of Baker's Secret unsweetened chocolate - the stuff in the orange box.



Just as an aside here, I can't be the only person who ignored their Mom's warnings & tried to eat a brick of unsweetened chocolate can I? I mean I know my Mom told me it wouldn't taste good, but it looked like chocolate & it smelled like chocolate, so I figured she was just trying to pull one over on me. That is one lesson that I really needed to learn the hard way. It was also a lesson I never forgot! You see my chocolate addiction started at a early age once I discovered where my Mom kept her stash of chocolate chips. It's my only vice so, I figure that's ok. (What?! You mean you remembered that I listed butter as my 1 vice? So sue me...I have 2. Ok, maybe I have a few more, but we won't talk about those now. Just humor me!)



Ok, without further ado, here it is... The recipe. I promise you that it's so easy you may never go back to the mix again (assuming you have unsweetened chocolate in your pantry. You should you know. You never know when you may need to whip up a batch of brownies in an emergency).



Baker's Secret One Bowl Brownies

4 squares of unsweetened chocolate
1 1/2 sticks butter
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Heat chocolate and butter in large bowl in the microwave until butter is melted. Stir until chocolate melts and mixture is completely smooth. Stir sugar into chocolate . Mix in eggs and vanilla until blended. Stir into flour. Spread in greased 13X9 inched pan. Bake 35 or 40 minutes.


That's it! See how easy it is? Really, you should try them. How about right now?
If you are really having an intense need for chocolate, I recommend adding semi-sweet or dark chocolate bits into the batter. Go on, you know you want to do it. I won't tell anyone.

I wasn't the only person here at the Cracker house who indulged in their love of chocolate today. After naps, the Cracker children wanted to go play in the 1 inch of snow that had fallen since this morning. We had some fun & made a few snow angels then headed back inside for the best part of playing in the snow - the hot chocolate.

As you can see, I have passed on my love of this dangerous substance to my children.

Here's C lovin' himself some hot chocolate

And my little K is addicted to the stuff

Seriously, right down to the last drop...

MMMmmmm.... Chocolate!

The call....

Right after I posted my last blog today the phone rang. The number displayed on the phone was one I had been expecting to see for the past 3 months. One I had expected to get every Tuesday and Thursday morning since my daughter K had started pre-school in August. The call informing me that I needed to come & get her because she had a BM in her pull-up (They'll handle the liquids there, but no solids please!).

The really strange thing was that I was really not expecting to get the call today. I mean, she had just won a pair of red shiny shoes for her accomplishment of 2 days of "relative" dryness (I will admit here that I have lowered my standards a bit since I trained my son 3 years ago. My poor boy had to jump through much more difficult hurdles on his quest for potty training prizes). We had used these red shoes as a carrot for months ever since she expressed a desire for a pair after seeing her favorite cartoon character Lola wearing them. Like her mother, K often has cravings for new shoes.

Don't get me wrong, I knew that there would be many setbacks along the way & I'm not disappointed in K. I had just thought she had finally made the decision that she was done with pull-ups. One thing you should know about K. is that while she may be very sweet, she is also a very stubborn, very independent 3 year old girl. None of the parental (tricks) inticements, that worked with my son, work with K. She refuses to be bribed, cajoled or reasoned with. If she doesn't want to do something she won't do it. Not even dangling her favorite food will get her to do our bidding:

(She is her mother's daughter)

This is especially true if it is something that she senses is important to her Dad or I. While I think this trait may come in handy later when she deals with peer pressure, it is not so convenient now, as we try to (bribe) intice her to do what we would like her to do.

So, we'll keep trying. I will continue to encourage her, while trying to seem like it really doesn't matter to me if she goes in the potty or not (her doctor thinks this will help). I will continue to be supportive of her decision to go or not go on the potty & most importantly I will remember that this too shall pass. Before I know it, she'll be facing much larger issues than a dirty pull-up. So, I'll revel in these small hurdles & look at them for what they are - very tiny bumps on the road of life.

You know what? I just realized I still have a dirty diaper in the back of my van left from the pick-up at school today. Better go retrieve it before my van is declared a Bio-Hazard zone!