Drunken Chocolate Cupcakes

This weekend was the absolute pits when it came to baking.

My goal was to whip up a batch of cupcakes from a veganized version of this beer-cake recipe, but that failed miserably when half-way through the baking cycle, the cupcakes fell, ending up looking like pitted teenage acne.

I blame the Brits. The recipe was originally written using the *good god why?!?!?!* metric system. I double-checked, and all my conversions were accurate. So I'm not sure why this baking adventure turned out so miserably--that makes it even more irritating, not knowing why the hell you f-ed up. I should've taken a picture, but in my disgust, I didn't think of it until every single last cupcake was tanked in the garbage.

VERDICT: F (for Fucking Brits! Kidding kidding. =)

Instead, I whipped up a batch of the faustess cupcakes recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. Thankfully these worked out a bit better, though I still had a couple of complaints: they were small cupcakes, and they stuck to the sides of the little cupcake paper-cups, despite me spraying oil on them. Meh.

I frosted them, however, with the chocolate stout icing recipe from the worlds worst Brit cupcakes ever. Instead of using 50-55% cocoa solids, I used semi-sweet morsels (not sure what the ratio is on those). I recommend substituting out some of the sugar in the recipe if you choose to do this... They came out sweet sweet:

For the icing:

1/2 c. icing sugar, sifted

1/4 c. soft vegan butter

2 tablespoons stout

1/2 c. dark chocolate (50-55% cocoa solids)

1/8 c. walnut pieces, finely chopped

Did I mention that I was trying to bake these cupcakes for a friend's birthday? Yeah. So when they kept getting f-ed up, color me upset.

I *did* decorate them with (well-cleaned) beer caps though, which was fun.

VERDICT: C

Not super-satisfied, I decided to whip up a batch of the Best Chocolate Chip Vegan Cookies EVER!, but color my day suck-ass, because somehow or another, they didn't expand in the oven like the first time round (they stayed the same tiny size) and they came out completely dry and tasting weirdly flavorless and cocoa-y. Yet again, I have no clue why seeing as they were yumtastic just a few days ago--the only thing I can think of is that a) it's all about the soy milk (the original recipe calls for just water, but I used soy milk the first time around when they came out yumtastic) or b) I f-ed up the first time around in my favor and used baking soda instead of baking powder--I'm not sure about this but will have to experiment.

VERDICT: F

I think I may need a couple weeks off of baking.

You heard me.