Chocolate Stout Cupcakes

My friend’s birthday is five days after mine. She always requests a cake - I think because she knows I’ll actually make it. (Reliable is my middle name.) Last year the request was for red velvet cake. This year it was for chocolate cake with chocolate icing. I guess if it’s your birthday, you get what you want. So, I obliged and made a chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

What I did not do was make a cake. I made cupcakes for a myriad of reasons:

• Small always wins the cute contest.
• Cupcakes are easy to eat when you don’t have a fork and plate.
• Individual cakes allow you to taste your handiwork without leaving a gaping wedge announcing you’ve been there.
• You can scarf down six of the twenty-one cupcakes and claim the batter only made fifteen!

I don’t have a standby chocolate cake recipe, so I searched food sites and blogs. I landed on the Chocolate Stout Cake over at Smitten Kitchen. (She actually snagged it from Epicurious, who snagged it from Bon Appetite, who snagged it from Barrington Brewery in Barrington, MA.) Pictures always help seal the deal with uncharted recipes, and Smitten Kitchen’s pictures are awesome.

This chocolate cake contains Guinness Stout. Reviewers at Epicurious said they could not taste the beer, but I could! I hate beer, so am very sensitive to its distinctive smell and taste. The good news is that chocolate and sugar makes beer taste good. (Next time someone thinks they’ll convert me with a sip of the most awesomest awesome beer, I’m going to ask for a fun size Snickers bar as a chaser.) The beer just adds a deeper flavor to the chocolate, and is not offensive to even those most offended by beer.

I used half of the original recipe, and baked the cupcakes for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. I ended up with twenty-one cupcakes. My friend’s getting cheated out of six cupcakes, but she doesn’t have to know. Shh.