For fun, I made cupcakes out of the two chocolate stout cakes I wrote about a week ago. After comparing the two in my memory and writing about it, I really wanted to know how they compared in reality. After some deliberation, cupcakes seemed like the fairest way to bake both cakes, even though it's a little more work. I planned to bring them into work and have people give me their unbiased opinion by trying both, and cupcake wrappers are a convenient way to keep track of which chocolate cake is which. That way, I wasn't potentially skewing the result by people's subconscious preference for a bundt vs. layer cake. I know I have a preference, but my answer is dependent on the type of cake... it's complicated. I considered doing both as bundts or both as layer cakes and distinguishing the two by frosting color, but I worried some people might have an aversion to particular frosting colors. Also, unofficial observation has shown it's a lot easier to get someone to eat two cupcakes than it is to convince them to eat two slices of cake... I might have spent a little too much time over the past week fretting about this...
I halved A Beautiful Bite's recipe because it makes a gargantuan amount of cake otherwise. The half portion works out to 18 adorable little cupcakes and was super simple to prepare. I baked her chocolate stout cupcakes at 350 for 20 minutes.
I made Baked's recipe as instructed, then poured it into cupcake tins. Since their recipe made enough batter for 18 cupcakes and then some, I decide to make the 18 according to Matt and Renato's instructions, then quickly beat the leftover batter for about 30 seconds, similarly to the instructions from A Beautiful Bite. I did this partly out of curiosity, and partly out of frustration with the fact that my batter this time around was just as lumpy as it was the first time I made their St. Patty's Drunk Bundt Cake. Yes, it's awesome to make a cake all in one pan, but it becomes significantly less awesome when I'm spending inordinate amounts of time trying to chase down lingering chunks of flour to avoid a catastrophic end result. I don't think the "surprise inside" cake concept applies well to flour pockets. As a 9" cake after whipping the batter, it was a lighter brown than the cupcakes and the sides had risen up a bit in the pan, as had the middle, creating a weird wave-like effect on the surface.
Ironically, I had no trouble with the Baked icing this time around, whereas I did have to add an extra 2 tablespoon of heavy cream to the Beautiful Bite frosting to thin it out enough, and it probably could have used more. I think the difference with the Baked frosting was I used previously frozen cream cheese, which flaked into tiny pieces upon defrosting and I could whip this into a perfect thin icing.
In the end, these are very different cakes. The Baked chocolate stout cupcakes were really moist, fudgy, and rich. As cupcakes, they didn't rise much in the pan - they went from ¾ full to barely the top of the muffin pan. You can taste the Guinness in the cake, although I think the whiskey in the glaze overshadows some of the other flavors. I didn't realize it when I made the recipe as a bundt, but now it's obvious to me this is basically a flourless chocolate cake. Aside for the difference in looks, there wasn't much difference between the cupcakes and the cake, where I had beaten the batter for 30 seconds. I told people that all three goodies were different, and a couple of people mentioned to me that the cake seemed like a smoother version of the polka dot (Baked) cupcakes. In comparison, the Beautiful Bite chocolate stout cupcakes tasted like chocolate cupcakes, with maybe a hint of something else. The Bailey's is subtle enough (or because I added some cream to the frosting), that you do taste the cake as well as frosting. I think the Beautiful Bite recipe makes a killer chocolate cake that you could serve for any birthday party and it would win rave reviews as a "chocolate" cake. The Guinness keeps the cake from drying out and the crumb is exactly what you would hope to find in a chocolate cake - it's not as mysterious or complex or rich as Baked's St. Patty's Stout Cake.
My co-workers voted on which they preferred, and although most people completely failed at ranking each item, and several people refused to choose a favorite, it's clear that the Baked cupcakes won. That's not to say the chocolate stout cake from A Beautiful Bite is "bad". My boss said it was like comparing a 9/10 and a 10/10, and some people preferred the way the frosting looked on the Beautiful Bite cupcakes, only ate those, and didn't vote. Most of my co-workers didn't try all three items (some nonsense about trying to eat less sugar), so the verdict on beating the flour in is a little inconclusive. Some people liked the cake better than the same batter unbeaten as a cupcake, so I guess that's enough to suggest that a quick beating after flour addition isn't going to have a significant negative effect on the final (cup)cake.
