Chocolate Stout Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

This recipe is from Donna Hay's 50th Issue Autumn 2010
I love the quirky ones and stout cake sounded like something fun to try.

You should've seen me in the bottle shop dithering over where to find the Guiness - it's never been clearer that we're not really drinkers at our place. The kind salesguy finally took pity on me and showed me the fridge section where they keep such things without laughing at me for being so naive. I finally explained that I was using it for cooking so I would seem like less of a fool and bought a bottle of wine too because he was so nice :)

But it was worth the foolishness - the stout makes for a deep, rich, dark cake that isn't too sweet and balances beautifully with the sweet salty frosting.

The original recipe is for a single cake but I made cupcakes because they are so much easier to take to work - plus I got some gorgeous papers for my birthday that were dark and beautiful too. This worked out well as it cut the 1.5hr cooking down to about 30mins in my super fan forced oven.

I also altered the frosting because I was almost out of icing sugar so it ended up as:

1 cup Peanut Butter
2T Icing sugar
1/2 cup caster sugar
1T butter
1tsp vanilla bean paste
a splash of milk (until it reached the right consistency)

The frosting was a little oily - really needing more icing sugar but tasted lovely - think Reese's peanut butter cup. I swirled it on and added a slice of mars to pretty it up.

The work ladies liked them for their lack of sweetness although the peanut butter was not to everyone's taste - but the Reese's adorers really enjoyed these.

Good fun to make and decadent but not sickly to eat- perfect!