Happy St Patty's Day!

In celebration of St. Patrick's Day last weekend, I decided to make a Chocolate Caramel Irish Cream Cupcake. I used my favorite chocolate cake recipe (dark chocolate fudge) dyed green of course.  For my liquid in the batter, I used Bailey's Irish Cream Coffee Creamer (which contains no alcohol).  Then I filled the baked cupcakes with a chocolate caramel ganache and topped them with an Irish cream buttercream (my regular BC recipe but again using the Irish Cream Coffee Creamer as my liquid).  To finish them off, a chocolate caramel drizzle.   These were very rich but very yum!

(green) dark chocolate fudge cupcakes

..filled with chocolate caramel ganache

And here you have it.. Chocolate Caramel Irish Cream Cupcakes :)

Cupcake Trio

Last week my sister placed a cupcake order for the health club she works at.  She wanted to surprise the staff with some Panny Cakes treats .. Yes, I said cupcakes, for a health club.. oh the irony.  Anyway, since she was sort of non-specific about flavors I took it upon myself to try out some new flavor combos.  I have a book with tons of gourmet cupcake recipes in it that I've been dying to try out!  The book is "101 Gourmet Cupcakes in 10 Minutes", by Wendy Paul.  (Here is a link to the book).

I chose a bunch of my faves from the book and then asked my sister for her input.  Finally, we narrowed it down to 3 flavors.  The first would be a French Toast Cupcake topped with Maple Buttercream + crumbled Bacon (how 'healthy' does that sound!)  The next one we chose to do was a Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcake topped with Chocolate Buttercream (at least the Cinnamon is healthy).  And for our third selection, a Lemon Blueberry Cupcake topped with Whipped Cream (I'm thinking this was probably the most healthy of the three). 

 The French Toast Cupcake was actually my favorite.. the cupcake alone was scrumptious!  Then to top it with Maple Buttercream was just amazing.. I didn't actually try the bacon topped ones (I did a few with and without bacon), but I was told they were awesome!

 I actually loved the Chocolate Cinnamon Cupcake as well.. who knew this was such a fabulous flavor combo? ..they really go very well together!

The Lemon Blueberry Cupcake was yummy, but turned out gooey and sort of messy to eat, since the blueberry filling I layered with the lemon batter didn't really 'bake'.  I'm going to work on this one.. perhaps I put too much filling in with the batter?  I definitely want to tweek the recipe because the cupcake itself was delicious.. lemon + blueberry are a tasty pair!

 

 My Cupcake Trio Plate!