From the Archives: Crème Brûlée Cupcake Recipe
In case we haven’t mentioned it enough, Dylan and I are getting married … this weekend! Finally after over a year of planning, our wedding is here. To say that we’ve been busy is probably an understatement. This week, I thought it’d be a good idea to visit a past post, and 1-up it by sharing the recipe. I’d say that’s a win for everyone!
Remember those Crème Brûlée cupcake that we made back in September? Well, if you don’t, you can check it out here. For these cupcakes, I highly recommend using the Crème Brûlée Stout from Southern Tier Brewing Company. If you can’t find it, another sweet stout could work too. Anyways, on to the important stuff! The recipe! This should make around 2 dozen cupcakes.
Ingredients
2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt, plus extra for egg whites
1/2 cup butter, room temp (1 stick)
1-1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs, separated
3/4 cup beer
1/4 cup heavy cream
3 tablespoons caramel
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, prepare cupcake pans with paper liners.
2. In medium bowl, combine flour, powder and salt, stir with whisk until mixed. Set aside.
3. In large bowl, cream butter and sugar until well combined. Add egg yolks and mix well.
4. Combine beer and heavy cream in measuring cup (it will look gross, just go with it) and add it to the creamed butter and sugar, alternating with the dry ingredients. Make sure to end with the dry ingredients. After that’s all together, add in the caramel and vanilla.
5. In separate bowl, beat egg whites (saved from earlier) until you get stiff peaks. Carefully fold into the cupcake batter using a rubber spatula.
6. Fill cupcake liners 2/3 full and bake 18 – 20 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
While you’re baking, you can prepare the filling:
Ingredients
1 cup brown sugar, plus extra for later
4 egg whites
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, room temp (2 sticks)
7. In a double boiler, combine sugar, salt, and egg whites. Constantly whisk while sugar dissolves and the mixture gets warm. Then remove from heat and use an electric mixer to beat it until the egg whites form stiff peaks. Continue mixing until it cools, probably 6 – 7 minutes, all together.
8. Add in 2 tablespoons of the softened butter at a time while continuing to mix on medium speed. After all the butter is added, increase mixing speed and beat until it appears thick, 2 – 3 minutes.
9. After your cupcakes have all been baked and cooled, use a sharp knife to cut out a decent sized crater in the cupcake tops. (not a ton, just enough to fill and have some cupcake left over.)
10. Fill the cupcakes with the prepared filling. Sprinkle each with a little brown sugar, then use a Crème Brûlée torch to caramelize the top. We have this awesome torch-like lighter that worked perfectly for this.
Enjoy these cupcakes with your left over beer, and you’ve got yourself an awesome dessert!
Next week we’re going to have a guest post from Cooking With Surly, which also includes a recipe, so make sure you come back to check it out.
Cheers!
Jackie & Dylan
Orange Cranberry Harvest Ale Cupcakes
In the spirit of fall (the best season), we present to you, these cranberry orange cupcakes made with Southern Tier Brewing’s Harvest Ale. We have been looking forward to trying this beer, and have yet to be disappointed by Southern Tier. This beer is perfect for fall! It was also perfect for our recipe this weekend.
One of my favorite (besides pumpkin) flavors of fall is cranberry. It’s tart but sweet flavor, is great in desserts, and complimentary to a turkey dinner for thanksgiving. Orange is great paired up with cranberry, so we used our orange cake recipe (with a few modifications) to make this tasty treat.
The night before we baked these, I took some dried cranberries and minced them, then placed them in some orange juice to soak over night. When I pulled them out of the refrigerator, they had absorbed a lot of the orange flavor nicely, and I added them into the batter. I also included some of the cranberry flavored orange juice to help carry through the flavor in the cake.
For the frosting, we did a light whipped cream and garnished with a few cranberries for extra flavor. These turned out exactly how I wanted them to taste. A creamy orange cranberry cake. The bite that you get from the Harvest Ale, partnered with the cranberries, really gives these cupcakes some personality. They would definitely make a great addition to a holiday meal this fall. I’m tempted to keep the leftovers here at home, rather than take the extras into work!
Crème Brûlée
We were feeling fancy this weekend, so we opened a bottle of Crème Brûlée Stout from Southern Tier Brewing Company and made some cupcakes with it (and drank the rest). If you’ve never had this beer, I highly recommend it. It’s a sweet, creamy, delicious stout that should not be missed. It added just the right amount of flavor to our cake recipe. To say the least, we were really excited to bake these & try them.
Last Thursday, Dylan and I met up with a food writer for the Spokesman Review for an interview. She told us she was going to have a photographer come over to the house on Sunday to take some pictures of us while baking. So we were really trying to make this cupcakes turn out both picture worthy and delicious. I’m pretty sure we succeeded – the photographer really enjoyed the cupcake, and I think he got some really cool shots. It’s kind of hard to imagine a big photo shoot going on in our small (really small) kitchen!
The really fun part of these cupcakes (besides the super awesome beer) is the filling/frosting. After the cakes were done baking, we carved out a little crater in each and filled it with our home made crème brûlée, sprinkled it with brown sugar, and took a torch to it. (That was Dylan’s favorite part)
These cupcakes were definitely rich, to say the least, but (and I’ve been saying this a lot lately) they are definitely in my top 10 cupcakes that we’ve ever made. I think I may need to start expanding our offerings list when we actually start doing business.
Cake, beer and fire… now that’s what I call a good time.
Speaking of business, last Friday (amazingly and unexpectedly) we reached our goal on kickstarter! Actually, we’re sitting at 116% funded right now, the donations kept coming in after we hit our original goal. We are so grateful to everyone who has donated – definitely feeling the beer cupcake love. We still have to wait until our campaign ends (October 10th) until we actually receive your generous donations, so you can look forward to us getting to work soon after that.
We are beyond excited to move forward with Sweet and Stout, thank you again for being a huge part of it!
– Jackie
Lime IPA Meringue Cupcakes
As I’ve continued down the enlightened path of craft beer drinking, I have come to realize that I really do enjoy a good India Pale Ale. I like a beer with a little bite, it keeps things interesting. This week Dylan decided he wanted to do a lime cupcake and we both agreed that the Southern Tier 2xIPA we had in the fridge would be a perfect fit. I opened the first bottle and put almost all of it in the cupcake batter, so clearly I had to open another to enjoy while I was baking. One thing I always forget about this beer is the ABV is 8.2%, it kind of sneaks up on you!
Another reason I may have picked this beer is because the label is lime green and it totally matches my new cupcake liners I bought on ebay. I mean, really, how could this have been any more coordinated? It doesn’t hurt that they tasted pretty good too!
After the cupcakes were done baking, and before I topped them with meringue, I made a mixture of lime juice and powdered sugar and put about a 1/2 teaspoon of it over each cake. I stabbed each with a fork first, so the liquid had somewhere to go. It was really messy and as I was doing this I wondered if it really would make a difference in the flavor. Well when all was said and done, it was worth the mess. I probably did this to 75% of the cupcakes I made today. When you bite into one of them, it’s like a little extra burst of lime flavor, very good!
This was my first time making meringue, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I just used a basic recipe and it tasted pretty good. I like how meringue is fluffy and easily spreadable. I piled it on the cupcakes and popped them back in the oven for 10 minutes and they all looked like little toasted piles of joy.
These were the perfect thing to brighten up my rainy day today. Oh, and the beer helped too!
Pumking Pumpkin Cupcakes
I know it’s out of season, but pumpkin flavored everything is my favorite. I had this bottle of pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale sent over to me from my Buffalo BFF from last fall and wanted to put it to use. I had already drank the other bottle she sent me and it is one of my favorite pumpkin beers.
This beer is sweet and it smells just like pumpkin pie (another favorite of mine), so I thought it would be excellent in a cupcake. Throwing seasonal thoughts aside, I went out to procure a can of pumpkin. I have to say that canned pumpkin out of season is expensive, but totally worth it. I had left over cream cheese from the last cupcakes I made so I used that for the frosting.
While these cupcakes were in the oven my house smelled amazing. It was like pumpkin pie bliss in the kitchen. Once they were out and cooled I knew I wanted to make cream cheese frosting. Lately every time I have tried to make frosting, it kind of turns to more of an icing. I thought maybe if I could find a recipe without so much powdered sugar it would help, but I had trouble coming up with a good recipe without it. I came across a recipe that had butter in addition to the powdered sugar & cream cheese (and a little vanilla) and this frosting turned out to be amazing. Probably the best frosting I have ever created. I have some left over frosting and I will be surprised if it makes it through the week.
I’m sure I’m biased, but these cupcakes were so flippin great. I will make these again and again and again. I do have leftover pumpkin and I found a good sale on a different kind of pumpkin beer over the weekend. I may be the only one drinking a pumking ale in the spring, but I always have been a little different.
– Jackie
Sweet and Stout 