This was such a fun cake to do! I have been dying to do one of these for what seems like forever!
I friend from work approached me about doing a 19th birthday cake for her daughter. Since 19 is the legal drinking age in this province she thought it would be appropriate to make the cake liquor related. Her first thought was a wine bottle but this cake jumped into my mind so I asked her if she would mind if I tried it. She was all in!
This was my first time working with sugar and I learned a lot. I found this recipes on Allrecipes.com and thought it would work for what I needed, if you would like to try it click here. The most surprising thing about making the sugar was how quickly it cooled on the cookie sheet so I wasn't really prepared to work so fast. A tip I have for you is to make sure you grease the cookie sheet with cooking spray or Crisco and also cover your hands in Crisco before forming it. It will be very hot so be careful, have a sink full of cold water on standby.
Just after I removed the sugar from the heat I added some yellow and some brown food colouring to make it as close as possible to beer colour. When it was slightly cooled I formed it around a long dowel. I wish I had made it slimmer but it was cooling so quickly I didn't have time to thin it out. Lesson learned! I also had to make the handle at the same time, again I wish I had had more working time with it as I would have like to make it smoother and less lumpy. To attach it to the cake I put a wooden skewer in both the top of the handle and the bottom before it hardened too much. I left the skewers long so that they would keep there place in the cake better.
The cake itself is made of 4-6 inch chocolate rounds filled with chocolate ganache and iced in all vanilla buttercream. I hope you like it, I think the next time I make it it will be even better as I have learned so much. Have a great weekend!
