Boozy Desserts

Before going to culinary school, I never realized how much booze was in desserts! In my cakes class, we used a paintbrush to soak brandy or rum on every cake layer before icing it.  So, FYI, prego ladies… give your birthday cake a whiff before chowing down (though I highly doubt most local bakeries are soaking their cakes in booze).

Anywho, in class recently we’ve made two exceptionally tipsy desserts; one, a classic… the other, slightly more modern.

First, the old school – tira misu. We did modernize it by making it into a petit gateaux (little cake). We soaked our cake in a mixture of coffee and ouzo (OOPA!), but I think sambuca would work well too.

I’m not a big fan of tira misu because mascarpone sort of makes me gag. This filling was a keeper though – we blended mascarpone with cream cheese and some other stuff and the filling was slightly more tangy.

I made little chocolate cages to wrap around my cakes – pretty cool, eh? It’s a cool technique, but the cage is super fragile!

Here’s the inside of the cake. I put a chocolate truffle in the middle, which unfortunately sunk to the bottom instead of magically hovering in the center of the cream. Dang you, truffle, and your inability to defy gravity! It was still delicious.

The second boozehound dessert was a mudslide cake. I’ve only had mudslides once in my life, when I went to a Turks and Caicos with my friends for high school graduation (which was, ahem, ten years ago).

After tasting this cake, I might make it a priority to consume mudslides more often. Would you still talk to me?

Let’s see, the cake was dark chocolate, we filled it with a Bailey’s white chocolate ganache, chocolate mousse, and topped it with a vodka whipped cream.

As you can see from the outside of the cake, I got to flex my cocoa spraying muscles again. The cool pattern around the bottom is actually a really thin almond cake that I wrapped around the other cake. 

Here’s the cross section of the cake – you can see all of the different layers. I ate about 5 cups of the chocolate mousse.

Oh man. Doesn’t that look good? I think I have a problem. If I go missing, check the bar at TGI Friday’s and look for the girl with a whipped cream moustache.