What have I cooked? Um…homemade pizza. I did make the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Thai butternut squash soup. I have also decided that I need to base all my meals on things that I have to clear out some groceries. I have a lot of pasta and tomato sauce. I also used one meal to take out some leftovers from the freezer. I thought it was my chicken taco meat, but it turned out the be BBQ pork. I use bowls to freeze in, and I don’t want to keep writing on them. Perhaps I should get some dry erase labels for my freezer bowls. I’m busy learning Ruby, so easy meals are a plus, and unless I get twitchy to make something new, easy meals utilizing mostly things I have on hand are on the menu. You probably won’t see me post about any new food. Except for the blabbering I’m about to post…now!

My biggest cooking feat was making an Irish Car Bomb cake. You may take offense at the name, but it is the name of the drink on which the cake is based. I made it as a birthday cake for a friend. I made two of these cakes, one for practice and one for the birthday. These are my discoveries so far:

  1. The chocolate you use in the cake is important. Yes, that should always be the case. It isn’t always the case for some people, so I’m going to stress it. Don’t you even dare reach for the Hershey’s if you are making this cake. I used Ghirardelli for the first round. It was not good enough. The second time around, I used Lindt with a 72% cocoa content. I didn’t have any Valrhona on hand, and the local store stopped selling Valrhona, so it is now an item I have to order or find in Kansas City. If I had it, I would have used that. I plan on getting some for later experiments.
  2. If you eat the cake the same day as you make it, you don’t really taste the Guinness. It does enhance the flavor of the cake in an good interesting way. You just wouldn’t know it was a stout that was doing it. However, if you eat the cake the next day, you taste the Guinness. It is also just as yummy, and if you are going for Car Bomb flavor, make the cake the day before.
  3. The cream part of the buttercream frosting is provided by Baileys. It is wonderful. I’m not a big frosting person. I find that sweet overpowers flavor, however adding the Baileys made it hard to quit tasting my work. When I make something that involves butter as a primary and important ingredient, I use good butter. For this frosting, I pulled out the Plugrá. The big thing for the frosting is that you don’t taste the Baileys as much on the second day. Making the frosting should be held off until right before you plan to serve the cake.
  4. The ganache that glued the two cakes together featured Jameson. I ran out of chocolate for this, and sent Mac to the store for more only to find they didn’t have enough for me either. I was going to use the same chocolate featured in the cake, but I had to mix. This featured both Lindt and Godiva. Next time, it will be the same. I will plan better. I didn’t taste the Jameson in the ganache, even after adding more than what was called for. Some recipes use Baileys here as well. It may be better taste-wise. It may not matter at all. This is still in experimental stage.
  5. Back to the cake recipe: I’m convinced that the cake recipe that I had was for cupcakes. I made some cupcakes with the batter to keep the size of the 9-inch cakes down a little. The cupcakes cooked perfectly. The cake didn’t. The first time, it sunk in the middle a tad. When I doubled the recipe, it sunk in the middle a lot. This happened in the oven as it was cooking. My first thought is the cause is the vast amount of liquid in the cake provided by the stout. When you cook it in cupcake form, it cooks fast enough to not sink. If you transfer that to a 9-inch pan, it doesn’t, and the outside is done before the inside, thus the heavy inside sinks. I filled in those craters with frosting and ganache, so the final look of the cake wasn’t bad. My other thought is that there is too much baking soda. I did some searching online and while most recipes were pretty much the same as I had, there was one that had 1 tsp less baking soda. If you double that, I would have used 2 tsp less. In the baking world, that is a lot. This is something I’m determined to figure out.
  6. One last cake note: This is a dense cake. It wasn’t one of those light and fluffy layer cakes. I don’t think this can be helped because of the liquid. Reading up on stout cakes, that seems to be the case. If people like layer cakes light and fluffy, this isn’t for you. However, if I have to cut down the liquid to stop the cake from sinking, then that will probably lighten the cake up a bit as well.

    7. I’m going to perfect this cake, however, I do think that Car Bomb cupcakes would be, well, the bomb. Really freakin’ good. And you can keep the cake part of the recipe as is. I’d still make it the day before. Do a Google search for them. I think everyone and their dog has made it and posted the recipe–with good reason. Yummy!