Saint Patrick’s Day is probably one of my favorite holidays for food and drink. I find this “alcoholiday” rather inspiring and decided to try creating a recipe using Irish-themed booze in a home baking experiment. I have always wanted to indulge in a Guinness beer chocolate cake and had an idea for an Irish mint cream cheese frosting to accompany the festive theme. These Luck-of-the-Irish cupcakes were fun to create and the YouTube video above offers a look inside my kitchen at home as I played around with this recipe idea.
The Guinness beer compliments the cocoa added to the cake and lends a certain moistness that can be attributed to the addition of a cup of stout. The extra stout or the draught bottled versions of Guinness work pretty much the same in this cupcake recipe. I noticed, when pouring and measuring the Guinness, the beer foams so much more than other beers I have used in cooking. Curious about why, I searched the Guinness website to see if the company could explain what I observed. Apparently, the foam is the result of a little chemistry and this plastic contraption in the bottle called a “widget”.
A what? A widget. The Guinness website explains below:
What is the widget – and how does it work?
Glad you asked. The widget is a plastic molded device that sits on the top of the contents of each can of GUINNESS® Draught. When the can is opened, a small amount of beer and nitrogen, trapped in the widget, is forced out through the beer, which creates the famous creamy head that you find on a pint of GUINNESS® Draught served in a pub. The widget gives GUINNESS® Draught in cans the taste and texture of a pub-poured pint at home. In GUINNESS® Draught in bottles, the clever little ‘rocket’ widget floats free in the beer to refresh the creamy head of your GUINNESS® Draught with each swig you take from the bottle.
Therefore, knowing that the Guinness Draught version is designed to produce a large foam head, be aware that measuring one cup of beer directly from the bottle can present a challenge. To avoid spilled beer, I encourage using a larger, clear measuring cup for measuring the beer. I used a two cup liquid measuring cup and did not spill any stout. Although there was plenty of foam that reached almost to the two cup mark, I made sure that the beer itself measured one cup. The extra foam is just a bonus in this recipe.
Enjoy the cupcakes. With that, I leave you with a couple Irish blessings.
“May the winds of fortune sail you,
May you sail a gentle sea.
May it always be the other guy
who says this drink’s on me.”
“Here’s to the wine we love to drink, and the food we like to eat.
Here’s to our wives and sweethearts, let’s pray they never meet.
Here’s champagne for our real friends. And real pain for our sham friends.
And when this life is over, may all of us find peace”
