Springtime Parties

The first day of April marks for me, not a time of wild pranks and charades, (though if you ask my parents, I have given them a healthy dose of those in past years,) rather, my husband’s birthday.  Though I love my February birthday, it is often a little too cold to have any kind of outdoor celebration.  Not the case for his!  The weather was just right for me (probably even a little warm for others) to enjoy a lovely cookout with friends.

I started the day off right by licking clean the bowl of Double Chocolate Stout Cake batter from where else but my favorite online cookbook.  This is one of my favorite past-times complete with sitting on the kitchen counter.  It tasted great and then this happened:

I took a shower and Greg pulled his own cake out of the oven for me.  He thought it looked and smelled great but with one look I knew that I blew it.  It was half of the size it should have been in the bunt pan and I instantly knew that I left out the baking soda.  (I knew that of course, because that is not the first time I’ve made this baking mistake.)

It’s a good thing I made some vanilla-banana pudding the night before.  I melded the recipe from More With Less with another not-so-healthy cookbook to come up with a tasty recipe of fluffy vanilla smoothness that melts in your mouth (though with a splash too much vanilla.)

Next Sunday, we are hosting Beer Church in our back yard.  Don’t ask me what this is yet because I haven’t quite figured it out.  Greg has gone once and I’ve met the “pastor” of Beer Church…a very hospitable and nice guy.  So, I think it will be fitting to make the Double Chocolate Stout Cake again to share with the other parishioners of Beer Church, especially since I still have the chocolate chips ready to go in my make-shift double boiler, (a pan within a pan of boiling water) for the ganache.

By the way, I’m calling this a “Double” Chocolate Stout Cake because I always make it with Young’s Double Chocolate Stout beer.  Another variation of this cake are the to-die-for cupcakes.  They are quite labor intensive (I have to set aside several hours to do them well) but are worth every minute.  Mind you, these are adult only cupcakes since the Jamison whisky and Bailey’s Irish crème does not get cooked out of the ganache and icing like the beer does out of the cake batter.

And on a final note, we have not had internet for over a week.  I’ve not stopped writing though!  So as not to overwhelm my readers (are there any more of you out there?) with four posts at once, stay tuned for belated updates.