Candied Bacon Topped Chocolate Stout Cake

 

The ultimate MAN cake! Happy 30th Birthday Ben! I had an epic baking and cooking day yesterday. I woke up ready to go.. with a plan in mind... I went to work.... what's better than waking up at 8 am on a Saturday to bake? haha.. I'm sure a lot of things.. but this... well this is special to me. My life as of recent has been quite hectic... sometimes it's just nice to slow it down and go back to what I love... and what I love... is to bake. I used the recipe I had for chocolate stout cake from st. patty's day, and frosted it with an improvised chocolate stout buttercream ( it separated though probably due to the addition of the sour cream :/ .. and the texture was not the best... I'm not sure what went wrong... this was the most annoying frosting to work with..... I used 4 types of tips to get some sort of design on the cupcakes but in the end I took my off set spatula and flattened it out..... talk about MESS... ) I frosted it with the petal design, inspired from the ombre cakes that I see on foodgawker.. ( one day I'll make that.. but that will be for something really special because of the number of bags and tips I need... )

Chocolate Stout Cake : http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Chocolate-Stout-Cake-107105
- Used Guinness extra stout 
- Cut the recipe in half.. made a 2 layer 6 inch cake, 5 cake pops, and 10 cupcakes....that was PLENTY of batter!

Guinness Buttercream : I made this as I went along so there isn' t an exact amount of stuff used...
- 1 stick butter, 1/4 cup sour cream ( might not use this next time.. it made the texture weird) 1/4 cup cocoa, vanilla extract, 2 oz guinness extra stout, powdered sugar, and a bit of meringue powder ( a tip I learned from my cake decorating class to make the icing have that shell/ set up quicker....)

Candied Bacon: http://www.closetcooking.com/2009/12/candied-bacon.html
- used a mixture of brown sugar and maple syrup
- The bacon surprisingly held its shape when baked.. I played around with it when it started to slouch, but overall, not as much shrinkage as I thought... but then again I didn't bake it to a nice crisp fearing my dreaded fire alarm.. that always seems to go off when I cook bacon... 
- I only used one toothpick to hold that 3 together 

Decoration: http://www.thehungryhousewife.com/2012/04/blue-ombre-petal-cake-tutorial.html

I've documented how I did it... sorry for the blur... I'm right handed.. and my left hand isn't 100% so taking a pic with my left hand was pretty darn hard... guess I should have pulled out  my tripod for things like this.... on the next tutorial/ cake pops thing... I got my camera super greasy taking pics at every step... oh hello... shiny camera :)

I did frost a light crumb coating underneath for a smoother final product... refrigerated until set. 

This was a super simple way of frosting a cake with some wow factor.. it isn't so clean or perfect, but that's the beauty of it... this took a lot longer than frosting a nomal cake with shell borders... but eh.. totally worth it. it was like pipe pipe pipe, set the bag down, pick up the spatula, smear smear smear, clean it off, set down the spatula, slightly turn the cake, pick up the bag and repeat.. probably 25 times....  

dots with wilton tip 12.. place 3 dots.. or as many as you want.
look at the size of your off set spatula ... it should be similar sized

use an off set spatula and press into half the dot 

smear it in one direction
continue down the line then add another 3 dots...
wipe your spatula clean ever so often..
yea that's going to slow you down, but it'll yield a neater cake 

Ta da!