My Goodness, My Guinness

A few days before St. Patty's Day, I saw this recipe on the food network website. I knew I would be out of town the weekend after St. Patty's so I probably wouldn't have a chance to bake. We were planning to celebrate Bryan's brother-in-law Robbie's birthday the following weekend (this weekend!), and Bryan thought this would be the perfect recipe to try. Besides an X Box cake (which sounds far beyond my experience level) I didn't have any other ideas for Robbie, and this one sounded easy enough, so I decided to go with it.

The recipe was fairly easy to make, and Bryan enjoyed the fact that it contains a bottle of Guinness. (Although, once baked, I really couldn't taste the Guinness and wouldn't have known it was in there if I hadn't made them.) I'd never made chocolate cake from scratch, but this turned out well. And I got to use cocoa powder for the first time! :)

The cream cheese icing was very creamy, so it was a little messy spreading it on the cupcakes. There's no way it could have been piped! I only used 3/4 cup of cream - the minimum called for by the recipe - and I definitely wouldn't have used any more than that. The dusting of cocoa powder on top of the icing gave it another hint of chocolate flavor - and gave me and Bryan a good excuse to make a mess of my kitchen - we were flinging cocoa powder everywhere!

Overall, I was very pleased with the result and would make these again. They were chocolatey but not too sweet, and the cream cheese icing (which is supposed to resemble the head on a pint of Guinness) was  unexpected but very tasty.