Food Adventures #5: Coffee Chocolate w/Bailey's and Guinness Chocolate w/Cream Cheese

The Cupcake Adventures continue! For those that are wondering just where this weird obsession with cupcakes came from well, I don't really know. I haven't overdosed on episodes of 'Cake Boss' if that's what you're wondering, but I did stumble upon this incredible website which has enough cupcakes to keep me busy for the next year or so- not to mention various recipes from Pinterest that have wandered through my radar.

Anyway, next up were these bad boys:

Coffee Chocolate Cupcakes with Bailey's Frosting- and yes, they were as delicious as they sound and were given two hearty thumbs up by the fam. As you can probably see, frosting is not my strong point as of yet- that's an emerging theme in my cupcake adventures. The frosting either gets put on too soon (ack! My impatience!) or doesn't have enough time to settle up to be fully effective- plus, I found myself ending up with way too much excess frosting. There's currently a tub of cream cheese frosting in my fridge that I need to figure out what to do with. Notes for the future: piping bag is a must acquire (I've currently knicked my Mother's and I know she'll want it back at some point) and mayhap a touch of cooling it down in the fridge might help make it go a little better. If anyone out there has any good tips on frosting, please, add them in the comments...

This also marked the first time I'd made chocolate based cupcakes. I think it went fairly well- and I had plenty of opportunities to practice with these bad boys:

Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes. Yes, they are as delicious as they sound, even if the Guinness gets a little lost with the chocolate it does add a lot of heft and texture to the cupcake. I'll make a mild confession and confess that the ones pictured above are the Irish Car Bomb variant but the cupcakes themselves are Guinness Chocolate. These went a little better and are super easy to make. The addition of Sour Cream to the recipe confused me a little, but the batter thickened up quickly and very nicely. They too were delicious and received positive reviews...