Gametime!

After the Steelers' loss two weeks ago, I wasn't planning on continuing with my Steelers cupcakes baking streak.  My roommates, however, surprised me with the Wilton Giant Cupcake Pan, and I thought I'd inaugurate it last weekend by baking a Steelers themed cake.
I used my new favorite chocolate cake recipe from Chockylit, as well as her chocolate ganache recipe and a butterscotch frosting recipe.

The chocolate cake and ganache came out fabulous as usual, but the butterscotch frosting came out super thick, almost like peanut butter cookie dough.  I tried to fluff it up by beating some butter into it, but that didn't really work.  If I were to make a butterscotch frosting again, I'd make a plain swiss meringue buttercream and beat some butterscotch sauce into it, rather than beating powered sugar into butterscotch.

Using the giant cupcake pan turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected:

1. The instructions that come with the pan mention that it requires six cups of batter, but I had no way to judge how much batter the recipe would make before making it.  As a result, I only ended up with about half as much batter as I needed, so both my bottom and top halves came out half as big as they were supposed to be.  In the future, I'll double the recipe.  Note to people who use box mix with this pan -- you'll need more than one box.
2. I'd read on various blogs that I shouldn't bake both halves of the cake at the same time, since the lower-volume top would finish baking sooner and start to burn before the bottom was finished.  I heeded their advice and baked the halves separately, but the sides and bottom of each half still ended up burning before the centers were finished baking.
3. The cupcake recipe said to bake the cupcakes at 350° for 25 minutes.  This worked great when I made the cupcakes, but not so well for the cake.  The outer edges of the cake were done after 25 minutes, but the centers were still very liquidy.  In the end, I had to bake each half for approximately 50 minutes until a knife in the center came out clean, and the bottom and sides of the cake were burned.  In the future, I'd probably turn down the oven to 325° and bake for an hour.  This means that it takes about two hours to bake a cake with this pan -- crazy!
4. Each half of the cake "domed" quite a bit during baking, which meant that I had to slice off the fairly sizable domes in order for the top and bottom halves to fit together evenly.  I used some of the frosting to turn the domes into a giant whoopie pie.  The domes were the most "brownie" part of the cake, so I basically ended up with a giant, frosted brownie sandwich.  Yum!

The Steelers ended up winning their game (yay!), but I'm still exhausted from all the baking so I don't think I'm going to make anything tomorrow.  We'll see how that goes for the Steelers.