Sunday, August 24, 2025

Chantilly Coffee-Whiskey Cream (and Monster Cake notes)

Lucas asked me to make this "Monster Cake" from our Zelda cookbook, which turned out to be pretty good. It was a fun combination of flavors, and everyone really liked the Chantilly coffee-whiskey cream on top and the blueberry puree frosting I made for the middle. We also enjoyed the meringue "horns". 

The chocolate cake, however, was a bit dry and not very flavorful. So, if we were to try to make this EXACT cake again, we would use a different chocolate cake base (even the recipe says something about adding an optional syrup to the cake after baking if it seems too dry... umm... okay... well, why not just make a better recipe that isn't so dry?!). Check out my suggestion for a better chocolate cake below.

All that said, I wanted to document the parts we liked (incase we want to use them for other things), and then document how we would change things if we did this again... cuz... who knows! Maybe there is a Zelda-themed day in our future somewhere.


Chantilly Coffee-Whisky Cream
Ingredients:
  • 1 cup (250 ml) cold heavy cream
  • 3 1/2 Tbl (25 g) powdered sugar
  • 4 tsp (20 ml) whiskey cream (Bailey's)
  • 4 tsp (20 ml) cold espresso coffee (I made mine from espresso powder)
Directions:
  1. Add your heavy cream and powdered sugar to a bowl and whip on high until thickened and firm.
  2. Add your whiskey cream and espresso to your whipped cream mixture, and whip until combined (no more than another 30 seconds or so).
  3. Keep refrigerated.
Marsha's Notes:
Homemade whipped cream tends to be unstable and will wilt or weep over time. Your beautiful cake one day might not be so beautiful the next as everything collapses. To help with that, especially if your cake is going to be sitting around for a few days, consider making a stabilized whipped cream, like this one:

For all my notes on how to make the meringue "horns" that used for the Monster Cake, check out my meringue post here: https://1brother2sisters.blogspot.com/2025/08/meringue.html

If I was going to make a nice, rich, dark, moist cake for my next Monster Cake (as opposed to making the one in the book again, which was dry and not anybody's favorite), I might try use our favorite Death by Chocolate Cake: https://1brother2sisters.blogspot.com/2018/04/death-by-chocolate-cake.html

For the blueberry puree layer, the recipe called for a simple blueberry puree made from 1 cup of blueberries blended with 2 Tbl of sugar... but the PICTURE of the cake showed more of a blueberry frosting. So, instead, I took (just some) of the blueberry puree made as described above, and I added it to my buttercream frosting recipe and made a delicious frosting layer that everyone loved (and which looks MUCH MORE like the picture in the cookbook anyway!). Here is my buttercream frosting recipe and I probably used maybe 1/4 cup of the puree (I just dumped some in, whipped it around and checked the color and flavor before adding any more, so I can't say exactly how much I used): https://1brother2sisters.blogspot.com/2019/11/marshas-favorite-buttercream-frosting.html

And, incase you were wondering, this is what the "monster cake" from the video game actually looks like.

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