The Root Beer Cake

My friend Matt is very popular.  He throws birthday parties like I do.  In ridiculous places with ridiculous numbers of people.  This year, Matt had his (40th) birthday party at an indoor trampoline gym place.  And here's the thing.  I really like to bake when there are going to be a lot of people.  Parties are my thing, it makes all the time washing dishes and being covered in butter seem worthwhile when I get all the eventual praise.

The trampolining was fun.  The people working at the trampoline place were terrifying.  The cake was amazing.  Seriously, people are still talking about it.  Well, at least I am, and I'm people.

Matt likes weird things (it's why we get along), so I decided to make him a root beer cake.  The recipe cake from the Baked cookbook and their stuff is pretty much no-fail.  Also, it gave an option of using root beer schnaps and I happened to know that my brother had had a bottle of root beer schnaps in his basement for about ten years.  I decided it was time to liberate it.

I wanted to find an icing that would make the whole thing taste like a root beer float and I did find an icing recipe that said it tasted like vanilla ice cream.  I even went out and spent $12 on special vanilla bean paste rather than just using vanilla extract.  I didn't really the icing lived up to its hype, but other people (who aren't quite as offended by sweets as I am) definitely enjoyed it.  And now I have the majority of a bottle of vanilla bean paste too, so that's something.

The cake itself was quite tasty.  It was moist and rich and really tasted like root beer.  I'm not sure this cake is going to make it into my recipe vault, but at least now I know what to do for people who love root beer!

Unfortunately, I didn't get any shots before I put 41 candles in, but it's pretty this way too.

40 is a lot of candles when they're all lit up!

Nothing says "mature" like a guy in a balloon hat blowing out the candles on a cake made out of root beer!