Irish Car Bomb Cake - Day 1

I entered my first ever baking competition. And there’s so much to show and tell you about this that I had to break it into two posts to really get it all in.

Without giving away the ending, just know that it was intense. Like, Food Network Challenge intense. Except without that annoying girl who replaced Keegan as the host. She’s really just obnoxious.

Anyways. My company did a St. Patrick’s Day baking competition. The only specifics they gave was either St. Patrick’s Day or green themed baked goods.

Maybe it’s the public accountant still left in me, but my mind went straight to baking with alcohol, specifically Guinness. So when my Google search, er, research, led me to Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes, I knew I hit jackpot. Guinness chocolate cake, filled with Irish whisky chocolate ganache, frosted with cream cheese frosting spiked with Irish crème.

I followed the Guinness cake recipe pretty much as written, except I was short on cocoa powder by maybe ¼ of a cup. I read in one of the reviews that this recipe makes a lot of batter. Let me confirm this by saying this make a crap-ton of batter. I filled two 9-inch cake pans, 12 cupcakes, and an 8-inch cake pan. Dear Lord, there was Guinness cake batter everywhere.

So while the cake was baking and cooling, I got started on my second attempt at a buttercream transfer, which is a design made in reverse on wax paper that is frozen and then transferred onto the cake. I’ll get around to telling you about the first one sooner or later. This one was way more detailed and larger than the first one I tried, but the first one went so smoothly I wasn’t overly worried.

I started with the black outlining on the hat, clover, and yellow areas so that it would appear as the top layer when I flipped the transfer over.


Then I filled in the yellow areas, starting with the smallest detail in the bottom area and then working across the buckle.



Then I filled in the green areas on the hat. My hand was shaking by the time I finished the hat. Baking is not for the weak.


I wanted to use a different shade of green for the clover, but I don’t think I added enough of the hunter green to make it really stand out against the hat. Oops.

And then throw the entire thing into the freezer while I cleaned up my mess of a kitchen. This was only the kitchen table. You should have seen the counter behind me…



Since the baking contest was on Thursday, I did my baking and buttercream transfer on Tuesday and then put the whole thing together on Wednesday. As much work as it was on Tuesday, just wait till you hear about Wednesday...