CUPCAKES!!!

Ok. As promised,  here's the recipes.

Apologies as the blog I saw this on is someone who prattles on & on. You can ignore all that & just look at the instructions.

Chocolate Stout Cupcakes
 - I didn't tweak too much. There's some good advice - have eggs at room temperature.
 - For yogurt in baking I always use the 'french style'. it's consistency is similar to cream & works well. I did not have vanilla in the house but the yogurt was vanilla so instead I put in a tsp of whiskey.
 - And I used a pinch of allspice instead of the cinnamon & unsweetened cocoa powder instead of the Dutch.
 - if you don't have a sifter, whisking dry ingredients will work.
 - I did not use Guinness, but trader joe's chocolate stout. Some of them are tricky - they're flavoured with artificial vanilla & can be really strong. but this one tastes like beer & not like it's been stirred with a bad candy bar.

They turned out great. Really moist but also light & fluffy.  I used frosting & caramel from a different recipe though, which you'll see here:

Buttercream Frosting & Salted Caramel

for the caramel, again I used the vanilla yogurt instead of heavy cream. It actually gives it a great flavor, creamy but not too sweet. & I used a little extra whiskey as I didn't have vanilla extract on hand.
the same with the buttercream.
No one who tasted has commented on lack of vanilla & the whiskey combined with vanilla in yogurt covered just fine.
Also no mixer so I stirred it all by hand. Yes. Really.

I also made these, which turned out good. Maybe not as impressive as the beer ones.

Chocolate Orange Cupcakes

 - The ingredients are metric but there's a ton of online conversion if you need that.
 - This was the big adjustment. I did not have self rising flour so I looked at subs online & whisked some baking soda & powder in before adding the dry ingredients to wet. For additional help I also added about a 1/3 cup of sparkling water to the orange juice. There's tons of recipes that use orange soda (full of sugar) & the fresh juice/sparkling water combo is the perfect substitute.
I didn't measure too exact on the water. when it was all mixed I put in a bit more to get the consistency I wanted. It's still a pretty thick mixture for cake but cooked up really well.
 - I used the same buttercream icing as the others partly because there was a lot of it. & because I didn't want to go super orangey. i mixed in a cream cheese one but it used caster sugar & i was not happy with how it dissolved. or did not. I'd go all powdered if I did that again.

& There we go. Happy to answer any questions.