Beer Yeast Cake!

When it comes to personal style, I have two sides. I love solids that are clean and sleek (my city girl outfits are modeled after that thought) and I love cartoon shirts (it’s the nerd and dork in me, what can I say). I may be 26, but I still love Hello Kitty, Gummi Bears, Harry Potter, Angry Girls, and anything Disney, so I rock their t-shirts! I also love t-shirts from Threadless and Think Geek.

Which brings me to this week’s cake… If you’ve never visited ThinkGeek.com, you should! It was Tyler’s birthday this past week, and seeing as Tyler is a science nerd (I say that with love) we were inspired by the giant plush microbes found on thinkgeek.com.

They have a beer yeast microbe. So, we thought it was a perfect match to his beer-tasting event.

Tyler has an appreciation for beer, so I thought we might as well continue the beer theme and make a stout cake. The recipe is from the Martha Stewart Cupcake book and it was interesting. It was a spice cake with a lot of molasses and stout. I personally think the recipe calls for too much molasses, and the next time we make the cake it will definitely have less molasses and more brown sugar added to it. I filled the cake with chocolate ganache, which helped cut the earthy taste. I then covered the cake with fondant and created beer yeast fondant figures. I thought it would be funny to have the microbes sit in a Petri dish at 100X magnification… later in the day, I thought it would even more hilarious if we saw the microbes having a little party of their own, so I added red cups.

I, personally, am not a fan of the stout cake (Tyler loved it), so I decided to make vanilla buttermilk cupcakes (my favorite!) with vanilla buttercream frosting as well.

I also made cake lollipops with the leftover stout cake and buttermilk cake. I learned this technique at Sweet and Saucy and people just love cake lollipops.

Hope you enjoyed our nerdiness!

I will be taking a break from my "1 new recipe a week" for the next 3 weeks. I do a have a couple things up my sleeve to show you, make sure to stay tuned. I can give you a small hint... our kitchen is being remodeled! Until next time, happy baking!