This is a creation all for my brother, Andrew! He has loved root beer for as long as I can remember so it was only natural that I should come up with some sort of root beer concoction for him one of these days. He loves chocolate as well so I thought, why not put the two together and see what happens? Well I can tell you, good things happen. Better things happen when you top these dark chocolate cupcakes with root-beer butter-cream. And even better things happen when you top that with a homemade sugar cookies coated in chocolate.
I need to stick in a disclaimer here real quick: I’m not sharing the recipe at this time. My brother has asked me to make cupcakes for his wedding and of course he wants these to be part of the mix because he just went head-over-heels for them. He and my sister-in-law-to-be Tasha want this recipe to be kept just for us. At least for now. So I almost didn’t even post anything about these but I just couldn’t resist because they are so darn cute…
I am having a bit of a moral/blogging conflict about not sharing the recipes for the cupcake and the buttercream so I hope you will forgive me! I am however sooo excited and flattered that they asked me to make them cupcakes for their wedding that I couldn’t resist sharing a tease! They want this root beer chocolate cupcake, a chocolate peanut butter cupcake and some sort of vanilla cupcake. I will be doing a lot of cupcake testing over the next year!
My brother loves red foxes so I found a mini fox-shaped cookie cutter and cut the sugar cookie dough with it. Think like 1-inch long each. So you only need to make like 1/4 recipe of the sugar cookie dough for this.
I thought about dying the dough red but decided to instead buy some red Mercken wafer’s at my local candy-making shop and coat each baked cookie in them. This would both color the cookies red and keep them fresh. It also added a wonderful crunchy element to this dessert. And I just couldn’t resist adding in a bit of root beer flavor to the dough in place of the almond. I picked up the root beer flavor at the candy-shop as well. It is sold in a teeny, tiny little bottle and is much more potent than your typical extract so start off by using 1/4 of what your recipe calls for (if it’s calling for an extract), tasting it and adding more if necessary. I used the sugar cookie recipe that I previously discussed but instead of the almond extract, subbed in a few drops of root beer flavor. You can buy a McCormick root beer extract at many grocery stores as well, so just use more if that is what you are going with. Bake the cookies until light brown at the edges, the time for this will vary depending on your cookie cutter. If you want to coat your cookies, melt some Mercken wafer’s in a double boil, and dip each baked and cooled cookie in the chocolate and allow to dry on a wire rack above a piece of parchment until hardened. You can store these in an air-tight container until you are ready to decorate.
I also chose to add eyes and a bit of white to tails of my foxes. Unfortunately, the decorating gel I used doesn’t harden so I had to wait to do this step until just before I was ready to decorate the cupcakes, otherwise I would have had to store the cookies in a big single layer (and I just didn’t have any room for that, or maybe just not enough patience, lol).
I guess there is a lot of motivational value to this post and it isn’t just plain self-indulgence but I guess you can be the judge. Maybe I’m just so darn proud of these that I simply had to share! I can’t wait to come up with the perfect chocolate-peanut butter and vanilla cupcakes for their wedding as well!
Filed under: cake, cookies, desserts, frostings, Uncategorized
