Butterbeer Cupcakes

A few months ago my husband and I started hosting a dinner and a movie night once a week. We have been working our way through the Harry Potter series and finally finished last weekend (I have mixed emotions anytime Harry Potter comes to an end). In honor of the movies I decided to try my hand at making some butterbeer cupcakes. I found this recipe on Pinterest and have been dying to try them!

If you are like me and haven't been able to make your way down to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter yet you might wonder 'What does butterbeer even taste like???'. After doing some research, I found that most copycat butterbeer recipes contains some combination of melted butter (or imitation butter flavor), cream soda, butterscotch, and sometimes rum. In the case of these cupcake, the 'butterbeer' flavor comes mostly from butterscotch chips, imitation butter flavor, and a little bit of cream soda. Maybe next time I'll experiment and try to work in some rum...

These cupcakes have a butterscotch cake (infused with cream soda and imitation butter flavor) that is filled with a butterscotch ganache, that is then topped with a butterscotch and butter flavored icing. Sound like a lot of flavor doesn't it?

After making them, here are my thought on these cupcakes:

• They are good but not great. Sorry to be a buzz-kill... (Although a few of our dinner guests loved them, so maybe it's just me...)
• The ganache is delicous, but if you make it I would recommend starting off with less heavy cream than the recipe suggests (my ganach was a little too runny).
• The icing was also delicious!
• But the cake...it wasn't bad, but I think it could use some work. There was something about the texture of the cake that I didn't love, but it could possibly be fixed by leaving them in the oven a few minutes longer (The cupcakes were cooked through (a toothpick came out clean!), but they still just seemed almost under cooked in the middle somehow). They were also surprisingly lacking in flavor! In the end, it turned out to be ok because the ganache and icing had so much flavor and sweetness, that it balanced it out.

If you would like to try these butterbeer cupcakes, here is the recipe I used: http://www.pastryaffair.com/blog/2011/7/14/butterbeer-cupcakes.html

Happy baking!

 Here are some more pictures of my cupcakes, because I think they're cute!