summer! birthdays! while i gave my roommate a "choice" for her birthday cake (and it was, i would have baked almost anything), i was heavily leaning for chocolate guinness cake. it's been in my del.icio.us queue since december of 2004. that's three and a half years! luckily, i manipulated/convinced her that this indeed was the cake she wanted for her 24th birthday. i ended up using both the previous recipe and this one. it is basically the same recipe with strange differences in sour cream, butter and cocoa amounts. i split the difference in all of those, i think. and despite having a bad experience with a cream cheese frosting last year, i determined that letting the cream cheese soften up enough would solve most of the problem. i also added a few squares of melted chocolate to the frosting. it was a lot softer than i thought it would be, but firmed up nicely in the fridge. decoration from hagelslag sprinkles. there isn't a lot of beer at all in the cake, and the flavor is very subtle to the point of being almost non-existent, but i'm guessing it does add a lot of flavor somehow, as the cake tastes much more chocolately beyond just adding cocoa powder.
the cake dome fits (barely) in the fridge, but does protect the cake well...it was pretty moist to being with, but it's stayed moist too.

I have a couple other pictures of things I baked, but none of them were very spectacular.
In any case, I had my birthday again. I was much more blase about this one (this twenty-five?) than I was last year, maybe because I didn't plan a large party (yet). I did get much more excited when I received the X-Files box set from my parents. (Thanks parents.)
Not being all that excited does not mean no cake however. My del.icio.us is full of cake recipes, which I never make unless I have a good occasion. And even then, I sort of draw the line at more 3 sticks of butter in a cake. I started out with this, but only used the actual cake part. I had been meaning to make lemon curd at some point (look, I don't know, to go with scones or something) so I adapted this curd recipe for orange curd to put in the middle. And I really was going to go for the 'creamsicle' flavor with vanilla and orange frosting, but I decided that chocolate would work much better. And, thankfully, it did. My roommates compared the cake to an orange Milano cookie, and I thought it tasted like a Chocolate Orange, which I usually get for Christmas.
I *had* to go to a Yankees game the night before my birthday, when I was going to make the cake, so it got bumped up to the day of, between work and going out to dinner with my generous roommates at Franny's, which has been on my to-go-to list for forevvvvver. (Aside: It was very good, although the appetizers were perhaps better than the pizza)
So, the first problem was that we can no longer get the drawer beneath the oven open. I was dismissive of my roommate when he said he couldn't open it, but...it cannot be opened. I was somewhat apprehensive of sticking my hand under the oven (there was something of a mouse problem earlier- it's been a very long month) but it's really truly stuck. The cake recipe, if you will notice, calls for a 9"x 13" pan. This being inaccessible, and the fact that I refuse to buy two pans of the same shape because really, when am I ever going to need *two* pans...means that I had a square cake and a circle cake. The circle was smaller, so I circled the square somewhat successfully to come up with this.
The curd took forever to cook, and I think I do like lemon curd better, but it came out nice and thick and didn't use 9 eggs, so I liked it. This went between, and I have a lot leftover that I need to find a use for. Maybe cookies?
The frosting didn't use too much butter, as sour cream made up much of the bulk (right now my roommates will yell sour cream?!) and came out nicely.
It's not all that attractive to look at, and needed some time in the fridge to firm up the frosting.
But it was very tasty. As opposed to last year's, which was much prettier, but I realize I didn't like it all that much. But apparently I've made curd two years in a row and added strange dairy products to the frostings both times too.