Thursday 13 September 2012

Chocolate Guinness cake

I really feel I should like Guinness, after all it does look delicious with its combination of deep chocolate and an ice cream foam top. Unfortunately, no matter how many attempts I have at trying it, hoping that this time I will have a revelatory experience, I still don't like Guinness. However, I know someone who does. So when they had a birthday coming up, a Guinness and chocolate cake seemed like a good choice. I was also encouraged by the recipe descriptions which generally said that you couldn't taste the Guinness and it mainly accentuated the chocolate flavour.

After a bit of research (a.k.a. Googling), I found Gizzi Erskine's chocolate Guinness recipe, which she has slightly adapted from a Nigella Lawson one. This was a great recipe which made a lot of cake, and the only change I made was to use 85% cocoa content chocolate rather than 70%. Actually I also subbed self-raising flour for plain flour and baking powder, but they are both very minor swaps.

May have lost perspective of portion control with this slice. I may also need to invest in a cake stand.

My cake also took well over an hour to cook, but this is probably because I used a smaller tin to cook it in, so it ended up being deeper than Gizzi's original recipe. But the final result was still excellent. This cake was moist, with a deep chocolate flavour and a slightly earthy hint from the Guinness. And despite containing a shedload of sugar it really wasn't overly sweet at all.
So this is an ultra-fantastic cake recipe, that I would very happily make (and eat) repeatedly.

2 comments:

Shaista said...

Looks seriously tempting!! have only made Marian Keyes' Brazilian Stout cake, but this looks worth a try.
that icing though... could leap in and happily drown there :)

TheFastestIndian said...

Hi Shaista! It was delicious, but part of the reason for the ultra-thick icing was that my baking tin was a bit smaller in diameter than Gizzi stated, so my cake had less surface area on top to spread the icing. I have MK's baking book too, but am still trying to make my mind up on what to make! Ixx