Car Bomb Cake!

[forchancookie]

You know, I have lots to write about, but I am lazy. So I'll just share a recipe instead. I stumbled across the recipe a while ago and I thought it was something Brian should make for a contest he had a work. He didn't. Loser.

Well, his birthday is coming up and he was having a not-bachelor party thing, so I decided it was the perfect time to make this manly recipe. What manly recipe? A Car Bomb Cake! An Irish Car Bomb is not an act of terrorism, but it is a terrifying combination of Baileys Irish Cream, Irish Whiskey, and Guinness that you mix together and chug before it curdles. Ew. The cake however, sounds intriguing! A Guinness chocolate cake with a whiskey chocolate ganache and Baileys frosting. Mmm. The recipe is taken the Smitten Kitchen and the only change I made was that I didn't make them into time consuming cupcakes, I just made a round two layer cake. So let's talk manly alcoholic cake!

Chocolate Whiskey and Beer Cupcakes

While the Guinness in the cake gets mostly baked out, the Baileys is fresh and potent, so if you’re making this for people who don’t drink — ahem, nobody I know, but I hear such people exist — you’ll probably want to swap it with milk.

The Baileys frosting recipe makes a smallish amount of frosting — enough to just cover the cupcakes. Because they were so rich and this frosting so sweet, I felt it only needed a little. Double it if you want more of a towering effect.

Makes 20 to 24 cupcakes

For the Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes

1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
2 cups all purpose flour
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
2/3 cup sour cream

Ganache Filling
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
1 to 2 teaspoons Irish whiskey (optional)

Baileys Frosting (see Recipe Notes)
3 to 4 cups confections sugar
1 stick (1/2 cup or 4 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperatue
3 to 4 tablespoons Baileys (or milk, or heavy cream, or a combination thereof)

Special equipment: 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer and a piping bag (though a plastic bag with the corner snipped off will also work)

Make the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners. Bring 1 cup stout and 1 cup butter to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Cool slightly.

Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt in large bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sour cream in another large bowl to blend. Add stout-chocolate mixture to egg mixture and beat just to combine. Add flour mixture and beat briefly on slow speed. Using rubber spatula, fold batter until completely combined. Divide batter among cupcake liners, filling them 2/3 to 3/4 of the way. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, rotating them once front to back if your oven bakes unevenly, about 17 minutes. Cool cupcakes on a rack completely.

Make the filling: Chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream until simmering and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute and then stir until smooth. (If this has not sufficiently melted the chocolate, you can return it to a double-boiler to gently melt what remains. 20 seconds in the microwave, watching carefully, will also work.) Add the butter and whiskey (if you’re using it) and stir until combined.

Fill the cupcakes: Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped (the fridge will speed this along but you must stir it every 10 minutes). Meanwhile, using your 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer, cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes. You want to go most of the way down the cupcake but not cut through the bottom — aim for 2/3 of the way. A slim spoon or grapefruit knife will help you get the center out. Those are your “tasters”. Put the ganache into a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top.

Make the frosting: Whip the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, for several minutes. You want to get it very light and fluffy. Slowly add the powdered sugar, a few tablespoons at a time.

[This is a fantastic trick I picked up while working on the cupcakes article for Martha Stewart Living; the test kitchen chefs had found that when they added the sugar slowly, quick buttercream frostings got less grainy, and tended to require less sugar to thicken them up.]

When the frosting looks thick enough to spread, drizzle in the Baileys (or milk) and whip it until combined. If this has made the frosting too thin (it shouldn’t, but just in case) beat in another spoonful or two of powdered sugar.

Ice and decorate the cupcakes. [I used a star tip and made little "poofs" everywhere and sprinkled it with various colors of sanding sugar to keep it looking festive for New Years. I bet shaved dark and white chocolates would look gorgeous as well.]

Do ahead: You can bake the cupcakes a week or two in advance and store them, well wrapped, in the freezer. You can also fill them before you freeze them. They also keep filled — or filled and frosted — in the fridge for a day. (Longer, they will start to get stale.)

So, that's the recipe taken directly from Smitten Kitchen. As I said, I didn't bother making cupcakes because I'm lazy and because the last time I made a similar kind of cupcake (a Boston cream cupcake with a cream center) I wasn't very pleased with how they stood up against time. This recipe is the perfect amount to make a round eight or nine inch double layer cake. Baking time is obviously different. It took me about 45 minutes to bake my two round cakes at 350. Just be ready with a toothpick to check for doneness. While the recipe may say the frosting is a small amount, if you use four cups of sugar, you get enough to frost the outside of the cake while having a nice ganache filled center.

The first cake I made (yes, I made two) was a horror show. Why? Did I not follow the recipe? No, I followed it exactly and the cake was great! Unfortunately, I let mom talk me into using a car shaped cake mold. BAD IDEA! It took forever to bake. It sunk quite a bit in the middle, which is not good for its shape, because once it was flipped over, the top sunk in. I thought I had solved that by scooping out the inside, filling it with the ganache and then putting the bottom back before flipping it over, but this was not so. I still had major sinking issues. But I thought, hey, it's a car bomb cake, it should look like it exploded!

The other thing about a cake that is shaped like a car is that you have to be super dedicated to decorating it realistically and...I wasn't. I slapped a layer of frosting on the cake and stared at it for a while going "Uuuuuuhhhhhhh." Andrew and I did terrible terrible things to that cake. "Flames" in red, orange and yellow sparkle gel icing. A giant hole where the engine would have exploded. Purple poops of "smoke". In other words, the ugliest cake I've ever made. A true disaster! But at least it tasted good!

I still had some Guinness left over and I didn't actually get to eat any of the first cake since it went off with Andrew to Brian's party thing. So I made another one, this time in eight inch round cake pans. I was afraid the cake would rise out of the pans a lot since the batter filled them so much, but it didn't. It's a really rich and dense cake with a bit of an odd sparkle on the tongue from the Guinness. The ganache is a bit bitter for my tastes. I think next time I'd either sweeten up the ganache a tad or do away with it altogether and increase the Baileys frosting. Why? Because the frosting is my favorite part! Baileys makes an excellent frosting. Mmm. We couldn't stop sticking our fingers in it! Although, for the second cake, we didn't have enough so we substituted some Godiva white chocolate liquor and that worked just fine, though it tasted slightly more alcoholic.

Ultimately, you get a rich, dense chocolaty cake with a sinful truffle layer and delicious sweet frosting. How can you go wrong? I call it a manly cake, given the alcohol content, but honestly, all this chocolate with Baileys frosting screams that it's for the ladies! And if you like bittersweet chocolate, that truffle-y ganache layer will undo you. Have a glass of milk at hand, you'll need it!