The Cake Merchant

Bar Snack Cake

Bar Snack Cake

I can’t believe that after 5 years of blogging, I’ve never made a chocolate stout cake! This one has been brewing (see what I did there) in my head for a while, and I wasn’t going to let another St. Patty’s Day go by without posting one. It ultimately morphed into this manly creation that I call the Bar Snack Cake. It’s paired with a peanut butter pretzel frosting, and ganache is made with beer rather than cream.

Bar Snack Cake

Over the last few years, I’ve developed a taste for stout beer. I’m not really a fan of Guinness, but I do like a good chocolate or coffee stout. Originally, I thought the beer flavor would be subtle and just add some depth of flavor, but you can really taste it in both the cake and the ganache, so use a beer that you like the taste of. I used a coffee stout and thought it paired well with the chocolate.

Bar Snack Cake

The cake can be made a few days in advance, but I’d recommend frosting it the day that it is baked to keep the pretzels from getting soggy. If you don’t mind a little extra work, you can swap out the crushed pretzels for malted pretzel crumbs from this Momofuku inspired recipe I posted a couple of years ago.

Bar Snack Cake

A couple of weeks ago, I took a poll on Facebook and Instagram, and asked my readers to choose between 3 recipes that they wanted to see on the blog. I results were split pretty evenly 3 ways, so this post is the first of the three. Stay tuned for the next post- a frosting tutorial!

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Funfetti Cake

Funfetti Layer Cake

Is there a point where one outgrows funfetti cake? Let me rephrase that. Is there a point where one should outgrow funfetti cake? If so, that point has not yet arrived for me. Or maybe I’m just a 12 year old in a 30-something’s body, but funfetti makes me just as happy as it did 20 years ago. Since today is my birthday, I went all out with this sprinkletastic cake!

I knew that I wanted one of my birthday cakes this year to be funfetti (if you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I always make 2 cakes since I’m super indecisive), but I hadn’t found a recipe that I really wanted to make. Like chocolate chip cookies, I think everyone has their own preference for the kind of vanilla cake that they like. I like mine light and fluffy, with extra vanilla bean paste, and full of sprinkles.

Funfetti Cake

A few years ago, I found a recipe for a vanilla cupcake that I really liked (I used it in this recipe), but a good cupcake recipe doesn’t always make a great cake. When I made it in cake form, it was dense and a little sturdier than I envisioned, so I made 2 changes.

First, I changed the mixing method from the traditional creaming method to the reverse creaming method. Rather than creaming the butter and sugar together first, the dry ingredients and beaten together with the butter and some of the milk. By coating the flour with fat, gluten formation is inhibited, producing a cake with a finer crumb. It’s also harder to over mix, and a foolproof cake recipe is never a bad thing.

I also subbed some of the all-purpose flour with cake flour to get some extra lightness. I thought about replacing it with cake flour entirely, but sometimes I think cake flour has a weird aftertaste, so I didn’t want to use too much of it. I know, weird logic, but I was willing to trade in some of the lightness for flavor. Plus, it’s my birthday so I can pretty much do what I want (within legal limits).

Funfetti Cake

The frosting if what I like to call “Cream Cheese-ish Frosting.” I didn’t want a super sweet frosting, even though funfetti cake traditionally calls for it. I ended up taking my regular old American buttercream recipe, cutting back the sugar and swapping out some the butter with cream cheese. The result is a lighter, less sweet buttercream with minimal effort. The secret to getting a great texture with this frosting is the temperature of your ingredients. The cream cheese should be at room temperature, and the butter should be softened but still hold it’s shape.

Funfetti Cake

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Chocolate Smoothie Bowl Cake

Smoothie Bowl Cake

Confession: I’ve never actually tried a smoothie bowl. They are just one of those things that continually pop up in my instagram feed this time of year, and I love looking at all the brightly colored concoctions with fun toppings. The idea to make a smoothie bowl inspired cake has been in my head for a while now, and I wanted it to be something like a hybrid of the two- not as healthy as an actual smoothie bowl (because it’s cake) but healthier than the sugar/butter bomb that cake traditionally is. Unfortunately, my first attempt turned out disgusting (you can see it here). This green smoothie bowl look-alike was spinach cake with avocado frosting. It was also the first time I tasted something I baked and immediately gagged and spit it out, so needless to say it never made it to the blog.

Smoothie Bowl Cake

However, I wasn’t ready to give up, and decided that a chocolate smoothie bowl might be more appropriate cake inspiration. This cake almost didn’t make it to the blog either because after I finished taking photos, the SD card to my camera broke and I lost everything! But I took one bite of the cake and decided I had to post the recipe, so I snapped a few quick pictures in mediocre light because I was dying to share it.

Smoothie Bowl Cake

Like any smoothie bowl, the toppings are fully customizable. You can even replace half the flour with white whole wheat, whole wheat pastry, or whole grain spelt flour. Coconut flout won’t work though. I opted for a less sweet frosting and added a bit of maple syrup, but you can adjust it to your taste by adding more or even adding powdered sugar.

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