Baileys Cupcakes

I've been wanting to make cupcakes for some time now, but haven't been able to pick out a good recipe to try and then I remembered that after watching the Danish version of the Great British Bake-Off, I downloaded a whole bunch of really nice recipes. Thus, I started working my way through the list alphabetically and hit a jackpot at B already:

Ingredients
Muffins
Makes 13 - 14
200 g caster sugar
150 g soft unsalted butter
3 large eggs
150 g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla essence
50 ml Bailey's

Butter cream 340 g icing sugar
170 g soft unsalted butter
1 tsp vanilla essence
1 tbsp instant coffee
0.5 tbsp water

Method

1. Line a muffin tin with paper cases. Pre-heat the oven to 190 degrees C.
2. In a large bowl whisk together the sugar and butter until pale and creamy.
3. Add the eggs, one at a time and whisk until fully incorporated.
4. In another bowl, stir together flour and baking powder and make sure they are well mixed.
5. Add the flour to the batter and incorporate well.
6. Finally whisk in the vanilla essence and the Bailey's
7. Spoon the batter into the muffin cases, filling about two-thirds up.
8. Bake in the middle of the oven for 20 - 25 minutes, check with a toothpick for readiness.
9. Remove and let cool on a wire rack.
10. While the muffins are baking, make the butter cream by whisking together the icing sugar and the soft butter.
11. Add the vanilla essence.
12. Stir together the instant coffee and water first, then add to the butter cream and make sure everything is well combined.
13. When the muffins have cooled completely, decorate with the butter cream.

The recipe didn't mention how many muffins this would result in and since my muffin tins take 12, I divided the batter into 12 pieces. This resulted in a certain amount of overflow, which I clumsily trimmed. I think 13 or 14 would be better. Otherwise they baked quite well.

A word of warning. The butter cream has a quite strong flavour and unfortunately I didn't take this into consideration and piped away like nobody's business and used it all up. This meant that the Bailey's flavour was completely lost. So either make half the amounts listed above or just save the leftover for another time. Or as Lundulph suggested - just use plain icing.

I might experiment in getting Bailey's flavour into the butter cream as well next time. But still I need to focus on using less of the butter cream, it's way too sweet for my liking. I had a cupcake an hour ago and my tongue is still tingling from all the sweetness. My piping could have been better too, but the kitchen had become quite hot from the baking, so I placed the butter cream in the fridge to prevent it from melting. I piped it straight from the fridge and I should have massaged it a bit in the piping bag before doing that. Oh well...