Cupcake Experiment

I wanted to make cupcakes the other night after reading the recipe for Smitten Kitchen's new chocolate whiskey and beer cupcakes but found that I was missing the ingredients. Still, I decided to improvise on the recipe and make chocolate espresso cupcakes with Kahlua-flavored icing.

I substituted soymilk for regular milk, margarine for some of the butter, and yogurt for sour cream. The original recipe called for melting stout and butter together on the stove and then whisking in cocoa powder; I mixed a good amount of instant espresso powder with soymilk and used that instead of stout— it worked well enough but the whole mixture didn't stay together and kind of turned into lumps. Still, everything whipped up into a pretty good batter.

For the buttercream, I just used Kahlua and some instant espresso instead of the Bailey's.

The cupcakes turned out delicious, but a little dense. Clearly I should just stick to the recipes for a little longer until I can really improvise with baking.