Beery Yuletide Greetings!!

Yuletide greetings, happy holidays and a merry Christmas to all!  

I'm finally home from the sea for a little while and have stocked up the beer cellar (aka the garage!) with some fine offerings which I will be talking about soon enough.  I also got a Christmas beers box from Best Of British Beer which I will review shortly.

However, now that I am home the one thing I have been longing to do is cook with beer, more accurately, BAKE with beer :-)

I found a fun little recipe that used Coor's Blue Moon as a cup cake ingredient and thought I'd give it a go...

Recipe inspired by Miss Make here

Ingredients

¾ cup unsalted butter, softened

1 3/4 cups sugar

2 1/2 cups flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

3 eggs, room temperature

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup Blue Moon beer

1/4 cup milk

Method

1. Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl until pale.
2. Add the eggs, one at a time and beat into the mixture.
3. Mix the Blue Moon beer and milk in a cup and add to the bowl, beating to mix.
4. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl, then slowly add to the mixture, folding in so as not to knock the air out of it.
5. Finally add the vanilla and fold in.
6. Fill paper cake cases 2/3 full and bake in the oven at 200°C for 18 minutes until they are golden and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

I iced half of my batch with lemon buttercream icing and left the other half plain as there are fussy people in my house J

I found that the beer added an interesting texture to the mix, making it a bit more chewy.

Try it out and let me know what you thought.