Chocolate Cupcakes and Irish Cream Frosting

The other day I was out at Popular Bookstore to pick up a few items for an upcoming wedding that I'm working on and as usual, I got terribly distract (and tempted!) by the books in the cooking and baking section. Simply unable to resist, I bought myself a new cupcake recipe book as well as a pretty set of cupcake wrappers in this cupcake decorating kit. A splurge, I know, but whatever.

From my new book, I decided to try the recipe for chocolate cupcakes with Irish cream frosting. Naturally, I needed to procure some Irish cream for this:

The recipe itself was pretty simple. Just 150g of self-raising flour, 125g of sugar and 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder, 125g of margarine and 2 eggs. The recipe also called for a tablespoon of golden syrup which I didn't have so I substituted it with maple syrup.

So first I measured out the dry stuff.

With a mixer, beat two eggs. Then add the rest of the wet ingredients.

The work in the dry ingredients.

I used my new little ice cream scoop to portion out the batter (I was seriously searching high and low for one of these little scoops, even looking online and considering shipping it over from the US. Then just this week I was in Chinatown and low and behold, I found it in one of the shops that catered all the equipment you might need if you wanted to open your own restaurant or cafe! And much cheaper than I would have paid too!)

See how nice and even they look!!

Yes, admire it up close:

Pop it into the oven which had been preheated to 180 degrees Celsius.

I didn't take any photos of the cupcakes when they came out of the oven because my icing, which I was working on while the cakes were baking, turned into a COMPLETE DISASTER! The original recipe called for double cream and Irish cream. The problem was, I had never worked with double cream before and so I didn't know that I was supposed to be super careful in whipping it and not over whip it. You guessed it, I over whipped it and it basically turned into butter with water left behind. It was a horrific failure :( I didn't take any photos. I went online to see if I could salvage it but alas, I had over whipped it beyond help. So into the bin it went.

I couldn't let my lovely chocolate cupcakes sit unadorned so I ended up making regular butter cream and then adding two tablespoons of baileys into that. Actually, that worked out rather well :)

The result was still what I expected it to taste like: a little chocolate cake with sweet butter cream icing with a hint of the liqueur. Yums!