Beer Bomb

I suppose three out of four winning recipe is pretty good odds. Unfortunately, that means one was a dud. Thaaaat would be this one.



I first read the recipe for chocolate cupcakes with a brown sugar beer buttercream, I was instantly intrigued. This, I thought, would be absolutely perfect for my beer connoisseur father! I happily saved it and set it aside for a more appropriate time.

While selecting the cupcakes for Monkey's birthday, I remembered this and put it on my list of treats to make.

I really shouldn't have. I made these after the chocolate and Kahlua ones, so of course I made comparisons. They... sucked. Both used simple chocolate cake recipes- the Kahlua a doctored up cake mix, and this one from scratch. The difference was astonishing. The cake was dry and bitter- not appealing in the least bit.

The frosting wasn't any better. While the syrup I made was actually surprisingly good (not great, but again, I'm not a beer fan), the minute it hit the butter, I knew it was going to be a problem. Despite the fact that I had let it cool significant amounts, and then stored the mixture in the fridge to try to get it to a workable texture, and then drowned the whole thing in powdered sugar, I just could not get the frosting into a workable texture. It was simply too much syrup. Perhaps I should have gone with my gut and only used a few tablespoons of the syrup. In any case, the frosting was a disaster, and tasted absolutely horrible with the cupcakes. You can tell just how liquid the frosting was, because that cupcake had been stored in the fridge for a considerable length of time before I took the photo. I couldn't even frost them properly. When it came time for the taste test, I think I managed all of two bite before tossing it.

Yuck!