The most luxurious cake ever made

I was supposed to go home today, but after a rough night thanks to some sort of bug, I decided to stay home and rest. I keep forgetting that even if it's the weekend, I need to rest up if I've had a long week at school. Sure, I'm not running marathons, but midterms and papers take it out of you.

Well, I stayed at home and got bored, so I decided to continue on my quest to make my roommates fat. I made Guinness chocolate cake with Bailey's ganache and Bailey's buttercream frosting. The recipe comes from Annie's Eats, and she makes them as cupcakes, but I've become lazy lately and refuse to make cupcakes. One cake is so much easier!

I love making this recipe. You start out by melting the butter, adding a cup of Guinness (or other stout), and simmering it in a saucepan. When the butter is melted, you add three quarters of a cup of unsweetened cocoa powder and stir until the entire kitchen smells delicious. Somehow the beer deepens the taste of the chocolate, giving it a little bitterness that makes it so scrumptious.

Again, this is supposed to be a cupcake recipe, but I just put the batter into two 9-inch pans. I also usually put chocolate chips in the batter because they're extra tasty, but I forgot to add them before I poured the batter in, so I threw them on top, hoping they would sink down as they cooked. (They didn't but that's fine.)

This is also the first time I've successfully made ganache. I tried to make it a while ago but it didn't turn out properly. (Perhaps I should've heeded the directions at the time.) So I was a little cautious about trying the ganache — every other time I've used this recipe, I skipped the ganache because it seemed like a pain. But I had time to kill so I went for it. It was pretty simple: just heated the cream until it was simmering, poured it over the chocolate, let it sit, then stirred. I added the butter and Bailey's, then stirred a lot until it was smooth. Pretty sure it could've used more stirring, but that's okay. When the cakes had cooled, I poured the ganache in the middle and it looked like a hamburger. A delicious, chocolatey burger.

This may or may not have been a mistake. The ganache wasn't cool enough and the top cake layer rapidly started sliding around on top of the ganache, so we stuck it in the freezer and crossed our fingers. It worked pretty well.

While the freezer was busy fixing my mistakes, I made the frosting. Now technically, the recipe has directions for making frosting, but I just kind of went for it. I used almost two sticks of butter and a lot of powdered sugar. I also added two tablespoons of milk (I was all out of cream by the time I got to the frosting since I used it all in the ganache, but I normally use cream for frosting), a tablespoon of vanilla, and about four tablespoons of Bailey's.

It's freaking delicious. The ganache is gooey, the cake is supremely rich, and the frosting is tasty but not too strong. I'm in love. It might not look very pretty (the ganache didn't stay together very well, and the frosting's a little messy), but it all looks the same once it's in your mouth! The way this tastes, it won't stay on the plate for long.