{beercakes} harpoon i.p.a.

I am a sucker for good packaging and celebrity endorsements. I once paid $5 for a bottle of Smart Water because Jennifer Aniston made it look good in Glamour Magazine. I admit that I felt cool buying it, even though I am in no way a water snob. I picked tap water during a blind taste test to decide which new bottled water we would serve where I work. I went so far to exclaim how much better I thought the tap water was, thinking it was the expensive bottled variety.

The same trick works for beer, as long as its cold, I usually like it. But a great label does make a difference when I am browsing the beer aisle. I absolutely love the Harpoon I.P.A. label which is part of the reason I wanted to use this beer for an I.P.A. beercake. This beer is also very good, so it is a double bonus.

I do find it kind of at odds that an I.P.A. would have such a pretty label. When I think of an I.P.A. drinker, I think of a guy in a t-shirt with a beard, not necessarily the kind of person who appreciates a purple floral beer label. But maybe I have misjudged I.P.A. drinking dudes. Maybe they are just as crazy about packaging as I am and just maybe they also got tricked in to buying Smart Water by that Aniston character.

For the Harpoon I.P.A. beercakes, I used an almond buttercream frosting. To be honest, the version you see in the pictures was my attempt to fix a messed up frosting debacle the first time I tried the almond buttercream recipe. They still turned out pretty cute and I have since much improved the recipe. The last batch of almond frosted I.P.A. cakes that I made were a favorite among my survey pool (i.e. coworkers). Two separate test subjects said this was their favorite frosting to date. I love when that happens.