Let’s make a beer cake!

One day last summer, I was shopping at a flea market and found this awesome cake mold of a beer mug. Seriously….how cool is that!? Until now, I haven’t had an opportunity to use it. Yeah yeah, I realize many of you would make a beer cake every week, but I felt it deserved to be unveiled at a special occasion. Like 4th of July!

 

You can see from my previous Jello post that I was not having a lot of luck in the creative foods department, but I decided to plow through and make my beer cake anyway.

Making the yellow cake mix was easy….open the box and follow directions. Done! The cake came out of the oven a bit pyramid-y but when I flipped it over, it smoothed out just fine and wasn’t wobbly.

 

Next was the icing problem. Have you ever realized they don’t sell beer colored frosting? Well, it turns out I can’t make beer colored frosting either. I couldn’t find food coloring in the store, so I thought chocolate and buttercream would do the trick for a dark lager look. Well, you decide for yourself, but I don’t think I succeeded. The top foam is just straight buttercream icing from a can applied with a spoon; the bottom markings are chocolate icing applied with a knife – yeah, you should use a piping tool instead!

Overall, I think the cake is okay enough and for the crowd I’m serving it to, it’s fine. You might want to take a bit of extra time to find that food coloring and use the piping tool.

Happy Independence Day!

 

Advertisement

Stained glass Jello for 4th of July – Great idea! ……… or is it?

Any holiday that includes BBQ and drinking is a great day for me. Throw in fireworks and you’ve got yourself a party! So when my friend decided to host a potluck Independence Day Party, I was beyond excited. What would I make? Should I try to be creative? Sure! Why not!

Well……I should have realized that I am not that creative, but alas I have the Internet so I hunted. I was very happy to find this post  that shows not only how to make stained glass jello but points out that you can do it in patriotic colors!

I should have known that it wouldn’t be as easy as it looked. I went and bought the ingredients; I made the jellos (in four 8 inch square pans because that’s all I had); I waited for them to chill.  Tick tock!

 

After 4 hours had passed, I realized I should start on the second half of the process. I made the gelatin mix (had to look up what jello blooming meant) and waited for it to chill. It didn’t say how long to wait to chill so I put it in the fridge……and promptly forgot about it. An hour later I remembered and had to smash up the now super chilled gelatin.

I attempted to cut my colored jello into shapes but it just became mushy slops. I put the kind of sort of cut jello in the larger pan and made sure the red and blue were spread around.

 

I added the gelatin mixture to the top and tossed it back in the fridge overnight. (Imagine the picture above with white goo on top.)

In the morning, I pulled out the pan and finger tested it – it bounced back! Yay jello! However, I decided to turn it over onto a sheet pan to more easily cut out the shapes and heard that liquid sound – glub glub. Uh oh! I released the pan and out came my jello goop! My red, white and blue jello goop.

I attempted to cut a shape out of it, but it just oozed out of the cutter. It still tasted okay, so I improvised and dumped the concoction into a clear bowl and stuck some flag toothpicks in.

Voila! That’s what I meant to do all along!