Bailey's brown sugar cupcakes

It's an onslaught of Irish things this week: first, my judge's birthday is today, and second, it's St. Patty's Day, so I made some Bailey's brown sugar cupcakes today for work.

The brown sugar pound cake batter was one of the easiest cupcake batters so far from Martha's Cupcakes. Mix together flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside. Cream butter and brown sugar, then add four eggs, one at a time. Then mix in the flour mixture in thirds alternately with buttermilk, so you end up mixing in like so: flour, buttermilk, flour, buttermilk, flour. That's it! Wow, Martha, are you sure I don't have to brown butter, mince rhubarb, or wave a magic wand over anything?


The little pound cakes would probably be good with a jam for breakfast as a sort of muffin, but Martha suggests either using a brown butter frosting, which I've done before for pumpkin cupcakes, or if you're in a holiday mode, a special butter and Bailey's frosting.

Thankfully, I was able to find a tiny little bottle of Bailey's, just enough for the three tablespoons the frosting recipe requires. Dave and I are not really into Bailey's, so I don't really care to keep it on hand. The recipe is simple enough, but I almost managed to screw it up in two different ways.

First, the bag of powdered sugar was two pounds, not the one pound I needed, so here I am, happily sifting the ENTIRE BAG over my butter when I noticed the label. Whoops. Luckily it was a pile of sugar of epic proportions and much of it had not even touched the butter, so I just used my kitchen scale to help me put 1 lb. back into the bag. For shame.

Then, after I corrected the amount of sugar, I realized that I should have first creamed the butter, then add the sugar by half cups rather than just sifting the whole load at once. I did neither, and you can imagine what happened when I began blending with my electric mixer. First, a mist of powdered sugar rose up into my kitchen, much as Mt. Vesuvius must have looked to Pompei. Then, the frosting did not come together for some minutes, making me worry that I'd have to spread tiny little butter pellets on the cupcakes.

But come together it did, suddenly in fact, and I was able to mix in the Bailey's and vanilla properly. I could definitely smell the Bailey's, and I was thrilled that the frosting looked like frosting, despite my best efforts.


Really, this incident is just another example of me completely failing to read the recipes before I begin cooking. I am usually pretty good with reading the ingredient list and being able to locate even very strange things, but I often won't even glance at the recipe until I'm getting ready to cook it. This is especially stupid, since I often will read through a cookbook for fun, especially something like "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Anyway, the cupcakes turned out delicious; even not being a fan of Bailey's, I can see how the vanilla, butter, and brown sugar combination makes these cupcakes so warm-tasting and soft. Another home run for Martha.