These maple bacon cupcakes are built on a cup of stout, finished with maple cream cheese frosting, and topped with bacon that has been candied in brown sugar, espresso powder and cayenne. They were originally posted here under the name Mancakes, which tells you roughly what mood they were made in.
The bacon is the part worth paying attention to. Cayenne and instant espresso go into the brown sugar rub with it, so what comes out of the oven is not sweet bacon with a bit of heat. It is bitter and hot and salty at once, and it is the only thing on the plate capable of cutting through a pound of cream cheese frosting. Half of it gets chopped into the frosting itself, which is why the swirls are flecked rather than plain white.
- Bacon in three places: in the frosting, on top, and in the smell of the whole kitchen
- Stout gives the crumb a dark, malty backbone that plain milk cannot
- Cayenne and espresso in the bacon rub stop the whole thing being one flat sweet note
- Real maple syrup in both the batter and the frosting, not maple flavoring
- The bacon can be candied a full day ahead, which is most of the work gone
- Makes 24, so it covers a party without a second batch
Before anything else, a word about what has changed since this recipe first went up here in 2012.
- What Makes These Maple Bacon Cupcakes Different
- Ingredient Notes
- The Candied Cayenne Bacon Comes First
- How To Make Maple Bacon Cupcakes
- Why the Original Crumb Was Dense, and What Changed
- How To Tell When They Are Baked
- Make It Ahead
- Storing Maple Bacon Cupcakes
- Variations and Substitutions
- What to Serve with Maple Bacon Cupcakes
- Maple Bacon Cupcakes FAQ
What Makes These Maple Bacon Cupcakes Different
Most maple bacon cupcakes are a vanilla or brown sugar cake with maple buttercream and a piece of candied bacon on top. The bacon is a garnish and the cake is sweet.
Two things move this version away from that. The first is the stout, a cup of it, simmered for a minute and cooled before it goes in. Dark beer brings roasted malt and a faint bitterness, and it does to a maple cake roughly what coffee does to chocolate: it stops the sweetness from sitting flat on the tongue. It is the same reasoning behind a Guinness chocolate cupcake, applied to maple instead of cocoa.
The second is the cayenne in the bacon. Three quarters of a teaspoon across ten slices is enough to register clearly as heat, and it arrives late, after the sweetness. Take it out and you have a pleasant, forgettable cupcake.
And a third thing, which is a correction. The version that ran on this site for over a decade used 2 cups of flour against 2 cups of sugar and a cup and a half of liquid, for 24 cupcakes. That is roughly half the flour a batter that wet can carry. The photographs on this page are from that original batch and you can see the result in the cut cupcake: a tight, slightly heavy crumb with a compressed band under the frosting, and very little dome. The quantities in the recipe card below have been re-derived to fix it, and the section further down explains exactly what moved.
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Ingredient Notes
Nothing in maple bacon cupcakes is hard to find, though two items are worth being specific about. Exact amounts are in the recipe card below.
- Stout: one cup, at room temperature. Any dry Irish stout or a milk stout works. Avoid anything labeled imperial or barrel aged, which can run above 9 percent and turns bitter as it reduces. The alcohol mostly bakes off; the roasted malt is what stays.
- Thick-cut bacon: ten slices, which is close to a pound. Thin bacon disintegrates once the sugar goes on it and you cannot cut a clean shard for the top. Thick-cut also survives being chopped into frosting without vanishing.
- Pure maple syrup: three tablespoons total, split between the batter and the frosting. Grade A dark, sometimes still labeled Grade B, has far more flavor than the pale stuff. Pancake syrup is corn syrup with coloring and will taste of nothing here.
- Instant espresso powder: half a teaspoon in the cake and a quarter teaspoon in the bacon rub. In neither place will anyone taste coffee. It deepens the malt and gives the bacon rub a bitter edge against the brown sugar.
- Cayenne pepper: three quarters of a teaspoon in the rub. That is deliberately assertive. Half a teaspoon is the gentle version.
- Cream cheese: twelve ounces, full fat, at room temperature. Whipped or low fat tubs carry more water and will not hold a swirl.
- Sour cream: half a cup, full fat. It is the acid that works with the baking soda and it keeps the crumb tender against all that flour.
What You Need in the Kitchen
Two standard 12-cup muffin pans and paper liners, two rimmed baking sheets with wire cooling racks that fit inside them, a food processor for chopping the bacon, and a stand or hand mixer. A large ice cream scoop portions the batter evenly and is the difference between 24 matching cupcakes and 24 different ones.
The Candied Cayenne Bacon Comes First
The recipe for maple bacon cupcakes originally printed the bacon at the end, after a frosting step that calls for six slices of it already candied and chopped. Make it first. It also needs an hour or two in the refrigerator to go properly hard, so it is the natural thing to do the day before.
Press half the brown sugar mixture onto one side of each slice, turn them over and press on the rest. It will not look like it is adhering. It does not need to; the sugar melts and flows around the strip in the oven.
Then set wire racks inside two rimmed sheets and oil the racks lightly. The National Pork Board’s guide to cooking bacon uses the same rack in a rimmed pan arrangement at 425 degrees F for 20 to 25 minutes. Sugar burns long before bacon does, so here it goes lower and longer, 375 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the fat has rendered and the sugar is bubbling all over the surface.
It will not be crisp when it comes out. That is the step everyone gets wrong. Molten sugar is soft. The bacon hardens as it cools and goes properly brittle after an hour in the refrigerator, and only then can you snap it into shards or chop it without it gumming up the food processor.
How To Make Maple Bacon Cupcakes
Maple bacon cupcakes take about forty minutes of hands-on work, spread across an afternoon while things cool.
First, candy the bacon: press the brown sugar, cayenne and espresso mixture onto both sides of the slices, lay them on oiled racks set in rimmed sheets, and bake at 375 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes. Cool completely, then refrigerate at least an hour until hard.
Next, bring the stout to a simmer in a small pot, let it bubble a minute, and set it aside to cool to room temperature. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F and line two muffin pans with 24 liners. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, espresso powder and cinnamon together.
Then, cream the butter and granulated sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes, and beat in the eggs one at a time. Whisk the cooled stout, sour cream, maple syrup and vanilla together in a measuring jug and pour it into the mixer in a slow stream with the motor running. It will look curdled and unpromising at this stage, which is correct.
Bake, Cool and Frost
After that, add the dry ingredients on the lowest speed and mix only until the last streak of flour disappears. Scoop the batter into the liners about two thirds full and bake 20 to 24 minutes, until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs. Cool 10 minutes in the pans, then turn out onto a rack and cool completely.
Finally, pulse six slices of the chilled bacon in a food processor until finely chopped. Beat the cream cheese and butter until light, add the sifted powdered sugar, then the maple syrup, salt and chopped bacon. Frost the fully cooled cupcakes and top each with a shard snapped from the remaining four slices.
Why the Original Crumb Was Dense, and What Changed
Look at the cut cupcake above. Maple bacon cupcakes should not look like that: the crumb is tight, the top is barely domed, and there is a denser, wetter looking band sitting just under the frosting. That is a batter with more liquid than its flour can hold.
The original called for 2 cups of flour and 2 cups of granulated sugar, plus a cup of stout, half a cup of sour cream, a cup of butter and 2 eggs, and said it made 24. That works out to about ten grams of flour per cupcake, against twenty to twenty five in a normal one. Sugar is not a neutral bystander in that arithmetic either: it holds water and softens gluten, so 2 cups of it against 2 cups of flour weakens the structure further at exactly the moment it needs support.
Four things changed, and none of them touches the flavor:
- Flour up from 2 cups to 2 3/4. This is the change that matters. It brings the liquid to flour ratio back into the range a creamed butter cake can carry.
- Granulated sugar down from 2 cups to 1 1/2. With a pound of cream cheese frosting and candied bacon on top, nobody has ever found these under-sweet.
- Baking powder added, soda reduced. Stout and sour cream do not carry enough acid to use up 1 1/4 teaspoons of baking soda, and unreacted soda tastes soapy. Three quarters of a teaspoon of soda plus 1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder gives more lift and no aftertaste.
- A third egg. More flour needs more protein and more liquid to bind it.
What Changed in the Frosting
The frosting was rebalanced too. A full pound of cream cheese against only 4 tablespoons of butter is very soft, which is why it slumps rather than holding an edge in the photographs. Twelve ounces of cream cheese to a whole stick of butter sets firm enough to pipe and still tastes of cream cheese rather than buttercream.
How To Tell When They Are Baked
Maple bacon cupcakes are small and the window is short, so go by the cake rather than the clock.
The top should spring back when pressed lightly in the center and leave no dent. A toothpick pushed into the middle should come out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it, not wet batter and not bone dry. If you bake to a completely clean toothpick you have gone two minutes too far and the crumb will be dry.
The edges will have pulled very slightly away from the paper liner. With a stout batter the color is no help at all, since these go into the oven brown and come out brown.
Twenty to twenty four minutes at 350 degrees F is the range. Start checking at eighteen if your oven runs hot, and turn the pans front to back at the halfway point.
Make It Ahead
Maple bacon cupcakes are a three part recipe and every part can be staged.
The candied bacon is best made a day ahead. Once hard, keep it in an airtight container in the refrigerator, where it stays brittle for 3 days. At room temperature it softens within a few hours.
The unfrosted cupcakes keep 2 days in an airtight container at room temperature, and they freeze well for 2 months. Thaw them still wrapped so the condensation forms on the wrapping rather than on the cake.
The frosting can be made 3 days ahead and refrigerated, but leave the chopped bacon out until the day you use it. Bacon left overnight in frosting goes soft and loses the point of itself. Bring the frosting back to room temperature and re-whip it for a minute before piping.
Storing Maple Bacon Cupcakes
Maple bacon cupcakes carry cream cheese frosting, so they belong in the refrigerator.
Refrigerator: maple bacon cupcakes keep 4 days in an airtight container. Take them out 30 to 45 minutes before serving, because cold cream cheese frosting is waxy and cold cake tastes of very little.
Freezer: freeze maple bacon cupcakes unfrosted. Frosted ones survive but the cream cheese weeps as it thaws and the bacon on top goes limp and pale.
The bacon shards are the first thing to suffer. If the cupcakes are sitting out for a party, press the shards on at the last minute rather than the night before, and keep the spares in the refrigerator until then.
Variations and Substitutions
- No alcohol: a cup of strong brewed coffee, cooled, gets you a similar bitterness and depth. Cold brew concentrate diluted by half also works.
- Bourbon frosting: a tablespoon of bourbon in place of a tablespoon of the powdered sugar’s worth of liquid. It suits the maple better than you might expect.
- Skip the heat: leave the cayenne out of the rub and add a quarter teaspoon of black pepper instead, which keeps some bite without the burn.
- A layer cake: the batter for maple bacon cupcakes fills two 8-inch round pans, baked at 350 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes.
- Maple buttercream: if cream cheese is not for you, a plain maple buttercream holds a crisper piped edge, though it is markedly sweeter.
- Smaller batch: halve everything and use one muffin pan. The bacon does not halve well, so candy all ten slices and eat the extras.
What to Serve with Maple Bacon Cupcakes
The obvious partner for maple bacon cupcakes is the rest of the stout, and it is the right one. Pour the remainder of the bottle and it works as well after the meal as it did in the batter.
On a dessert table maple bacon cupcakes are rich and salty, so pair them with something plainer rather than something bolder. Maple cookies with maple icing keep the flavor and cut the intensity, and maple snickerdoodles do the same job with a bit of cinnamon. If you want a second cupcake that is not competing, snickerdoodle cupcakes sit comfortably beside them.
They also make sense at brunch, which is the one context where nobody questions bacon on a cake. Coffee, obviously. Maple bacon cupcakes are one of the few desserts that genuinely improve next to a cup of black coffee rather than being flattened by it.
Maple Bacon Cupcakes FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I taste the beer?
Not as beer, no. What a cup of stout leaves behind is roasted malt and a faint bitterness that reads as depth rather than as beer. People who do not know it is in there usually guess coffee or molasses. The alcohol largely bakes off.
Why is my candied bacon soft?
Almost certainly because you judged it straight out of the oven. Melted sugar is soft and stays soft until it cools and sets. Let the strips cool completely on the rack and then refrigerate them for an hour, and they will snap.
Can I use the quantities from the original 2012 version?
You can, and plenty of people did, but expect the crumb you can see in the cut cupcake above: dense, low and a little heavy. The card on this page carries the corrected quantities, with more flour, less sugar and baking powder added.
How far ahead can I frost them?
The day before is fine if they are refrigerated. Add the bacon shards on top no more than a couple of hours before serving, because the moisture in the frosting softens them.
More Questions About Beer in Cake
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to simmer the stout first?
It helps. A minute at a simmer drives off some of the carbonation and a little of the alcohol, which stops the batter foaming when the liquid goes in. Cool it fully before it meets the creamed butter or the butter will melt.
Is there alcohol left in the finished cupcake?
A trace. A cup of stout across 24 maple bacon cupcakes is a very small amount to begin with, and most of what remains evaporates during a 20 minute bake. If it matters at all, use the coffee version instead.
Why did my batter look curdled?
Because it is supposed to. Cold liquid poured into creamed butter and sugar breaks the emulsion and it looks alarming for about a minute. The flour brings it back together. Room temperature ingredients make it much less dramatic.
Can I use bacon fat in the frosting?
Some recipes do, replacing a tablespoon or two of the butter. It works, but with candied bacon already chopped through the frosting it tips the whole thing savory. Try it on a small batch first.
Make the bacon the day before and the rest of these maple bacon cupcakes is an easy afternoon.
Maple Bacon Cupcakes with Stout
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Ingredients
Candied Cayenne Bacon
- 10 slices thick-cut bacon about 1 pound
- 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
- 3/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper use 1/2 for a gentler version
- 1/4 teaspoon instant espresso powder
The Maple Stout Cupcakes
- 1 cup stout beer room temperature, not an imperial or barrel-aged stout
- 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
- 3/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon instant espresso powder
- 12 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 1/2 sticks, room temperature
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 3 large eggs room temperature
- 1/2 cup sour cream full fat, room temperature
- 2 tablespoons pure maple syrup Grade A dark for the most flavor
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Maple Cream Cheese Frosting
- 12 ounces full fat cream cheese room temperature
- 8 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 stick, room temperature
- 3 1/2 cups powdered sugar sifted
- 1 tablespoon pure maple syrup
- 1 pinch kosher salt
Equipment
- Stand or hand mixer
- Cupcake pans
- Cupcake liners
- Sifter
- Food Processor
- Small pot
- Measuring cups and spoons
- Two rimmed baking sheets
- Cooling racks
Instructions
Candy the Bacon
- Heat the oven to 375 degrees F. Stir the brown sugar, cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon espresso powder together in a small bowl. Press half of it onto one side of the bacon slices, turn them over and press the rest onto the other side. It will not look like it is sticking, which is fine.
- Set wire racks inside two rimmed baking sheets and brush the racks lightly with oil. Lay the bacon on the racks and bake 30 to 35 minutes, until the fat has rendered and the sugar is bubbling across the whole surface.
- Cool the bacon completely on the racks, then refrigerate at least 1 hour until it is hard and snaps. It is soft out of the oven and only goes brittle once the sugar sets. This can be done a day ahead.
Make the Maple Stout Batter
- Bring the stout to a simmer in a small pot over medium heat, let it bubble for about a minute, then take it off and cool it to room temperature. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F and line two 12-cup muffin pans with paper liners.
- Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon espresso powder, cinnamon and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside.
- Cream the 12 tablespoons of butter with the granulated sugar on medium speed until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Whisk the cooled stout, sour cream, 2 tablespoons maple syrup and vanilla together in a jug and pour it into the running mixer in a slow stream. The batter will look curdled at this point, which is normal.
Bake and Cool
- Add the dry ingredients on the lowest speed and mix only until the last streak of flour disappears. Scoop the batter into the liners about two thirds full, using an ice cream scoop so they match.
- Bake 20 to 24 minutes, turning the pans front to back halfway, until the tops spring back and a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs. Cool 10 minutes in the pans, then turn out onto a rack and cool completely before frosting.
Whip the Frosting
- Pulse 6 slices of the chilled candied bacon in a food processor until finely chopped.
- Beat the cream cheese and the 8 tablespoons of butter on medium speed until light and smooth, about 2 minutes. Add the sifted powdered sugar and beat until fluffy, then mix in the 1 tablespoon maple syrup, the salt and the chopped bacon.
Frost and Finish
- Frost the completely cooled cupcakes, then snap the remaining 4 slices of bacon into 24 shards and press one into each swirl shortly before serving.