Guinness cupcakes

This is officially my first cooking post. I've been meaning to post one for ages but I tend to get carried away with the cooking and forget to take any photos! I like seeing photos of the final product so this time I actually managed to take some as I went. I baked these cupcakes as part of a Valentine's day present and they went down quite well!

You will need:

350ml Guinness (about three quarters of a can)
120ml milk
120ml vegetable oil
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs (beaten)
170ml sour cream
85g good quality cocoa powder (I used Bourneville)
170g granulated sugar
285g plain flour (you can use half and half with self raising if you want big bouncy cupcakes!)
1 and a half tsps baking soda
pinch of salt


This is what I did:

Preheat the oven to about 180C and put your cupcake liners into a tray.

Pour the Guinness, milk, oil and vanilla extract into a large mixing bowl and beat in the eggs one at a time. Then mix in the sour cream. These are your wet ingredients so don't worry if they're splooshing about in the bowl, they're supposed to!

In another large bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, salt and baking soda. When properly mixed it will be a big bowl of brown chocolatey goodness.

Now mix this gradually into the wet ingredients.

Your mixture is done! It should be thick and gloopy. Now spoon the mixture into the cupcake liners up to about 3/4 full and put into the oven for 25 minutes.

After the 25 minutes is up, remove from the oven and put on a wire rack to cool.

I cheated a little bit with the icing of my cupcakes because I wanted to make sure they looked perfect. I used icing tubes from Asda (chocolate and white), white chocolate stars and pink sugar glitter.

Let me know if you give them a go!

After Eight

My eight favourite finds from Lavish Alice. As you might be able to tell, I love print, polka dots and patterns. All of these tops could easily be worn with skinny jeans and heels for the weekend or smartened up with a pencil skirt and black cardigan or blazer for work. Obviously the sheer red top with sparkly collar might not be quite so appropriate for work but you could put a layer under it and embrace the sparkle if you so wish!

I think if I could only buy one item then I'd have to go for the tribal shirt (top left) because it could be worn with so many things and the print isn't so stand out that it would look odd. It would be nice in summer with denim shorts and tan sandals.

I've been looking for a dropped hem skirt (like the polka dot one above) for ages! I've seen loads of people wearing them on blogs and they look really stylish but also pretty comfy to wear.

Fashion dreaming done for this evening. The blog title was also a little nod to the fact that I've been desperately craving chocolate for about two weeks now and so far I've managed to hold off, apart from the occasional biscuit.

I don't know where this picture originally came from but I do know that it looks tasty! I'm tempted to make some of these brownies as a treat...