Chocolate Stout Cupcakes with Mocha Ganache and Mascarpone Cream

Chocolate Stout Cupcakes with Mocha Ganache and Mascarpone Cream.  Sounds amazing, right?  As I've mentioned before, I had a bottle of chocolate stout beer in my fridge that I wanted to make a cake out of.  This one was specifically Cocoa Loco by Arcadia Ales from my hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan!  I came across this awesome chocolate stout cupcake recipe and decided to use it for cupcakes!  Then, I came across a recipe for Chocolate coffee cupcakes with mocha ganache and mascarpone cream and thought the topping would be great for my cupcakes :)  The cupcake recipe was for a dozen, and I didn't need that many so I halved it.  The topping recipe was for 30 cupcakes, and I ended up quartering it.

My ingredients

Chocolate Stout Cupcake Ingredients

•  8 tsp (or 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp) unsweetened cocoa powder
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ pinch table salt
• 3 ounces stout beer
• 2 Tbsp melted butter
• ¾ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 large egg
• 8 tsp (or 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp) sour cream
  

No, I'm not sampling the ingredients...

Directions

1.  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2.  In a medium mixing bowl, whisk cocoa, sugar, flour, baking soda and salt until combined.
3.  In a large mixing bowl, mix the stout, melted butter and vanilla together.

At this point I realized that using cold beer, while tasty, doesn't work when you're mixing it with melted butter. The cold beer made some of the butter hard again so the mixture was lumpy and hard to mix well. Next time I'll have to keep the beer at room temperature.

4.  Beat the egg into the stout mixture. Then mix in the sour cream.
5.  Add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients a little at a time until it’s all mixed together thouroughly.
6.  Grease or line 6 muffin tins. Pour the batter evenly into the tins.
7.  Bake from 18-24 minutes, checking at 18 minutes and continuing to bake until they are set in the middle.

Ganache and Cream

• ¼ cup + ½ cup cups heavy cream

• handful of coffee beans – crushed

• 2 ounces milk/semi-sweet/bittersweet chocolate -- finely chopped

• ½ cup mascarpone cheese 

• 1Tbsp confectioners' sugar -- sifted

I'm not going to get super detailed into the ganache because it didn't turn out.  It was a paste like texture rather than ganache, which is weird because I ended up using more cream than it said so if anything, it should have been too thin, not ticker.  The cool part about this ganache is you boil the coffee beans in the cream, then let it sit and absorb the coffee flavor.

Beans & Cream - Strain out the beans - Mocha Cream!

After straining out the coffee beans, heat the cream again, then pour it over the chopped chocolate and stir until smooth.  If you want to learn the basics of making ganache, you should check out Martha Stewart's guide to making ganache.

My "frosted" cupcakes.

For the mascarpone cream topping, whisk the 1/2 cup cream into soft peaks.  Add the mascarpone and confectioners sugar and whisk until smooth. 

Whip it!  Whip it good!

I'm not sure if my topping turned out right either.  Their picture looks light and fluffy like whipped cream, but my topping seemed heavier and almost a little lumpy.  It still tasted good though :oD

Going to have to try making these again sometime!