Recently I took on the delicious task of baking a Guinness Chocolate Cake from scratch. In fact, it was my first baking-a-cake-from-scratch endeavor...ever. I do enjoy baking, but don't do it particularly often because: 1) I live by myself B) Baked goods are my weakness C) Because they are my weakness, I'm not good at sharing baked goods 4) This means I eat too much if not all of the baked goods E) This then leads to guilt and potentially an extra pound or two added straight to my belly. This Guinness Chocolate Cake business is a perfect example of that, but in all honesty, I enjoyed the cake sooo freaking much that I didn't particularly care about possible weight gain due to eating a piece of cake a day for pretty much a week.
I found this uh-may-zing cake thanks to a delightful little website called Pinterest, where you can catalog a variety of things on an online pinboard. It's fantastic! One of the "curators" for a food pinboard I follow "pinned" a photo of an exquisite Guinness Chocolate Cake, which linked me to Katie Quinn Davies' recipe for it featured on Design*Sponge.
I immediately knew that I had to try to make this cake for a Sunday Night Supper my mom was hosting; these suppers entail my parents and their dear friends getting together at one another's homes to eat darn good food and drink, what I'll call, a fair amount of wine. I regularly attend them as well enjoying the laughs and stories and their lovely friendship; they're like family and my parents are blessed to have such tremendous people in their lives--as am I. Additionally, I make notes for a potential book/movie that the other children and I will one day write... But that's a whole different story!
Anywho, you can't just bring some untested dish to Sunday Night Supper. Nope, this is some serious stuff. So my mom had me bake a trial run cake. This was helpful for me because I had to make some adjustments, but it also meant that I ate an extreme amount of cake...
My first cake did taste awesome, but looked hysterical because I frosted it entirely too soon. I blame it on the fact that myself and a couple of my eager taste-testers wanted to dig in pronto...
My second attempt, served at the prestigious Sunday Night Supper, went much better. Thank goodness, or I may have never been invited again! Phew.
This cake is a definite must try. Again, I had to make some adjustments to Katie Quinn Davies' original recipe. The biggest change is due to the fact that I could not find the called for Dutch process cocoa anywhere where I live, so thanks to the powers of Google I was able to find a substitute using unsweetened natural cocoa and baking powder.
Baking is a science, afterall, and since the recipe uses baking soda you have to add the baking powder to the unsweetened natural cocoa because, unlike Dutch process cocoa, it has not been treated with an alkali to neutralize its natural acidity. Yeah...it's over my head too. Anywho, this substitute called for math skillz that I'm not so sure I possess, but I think I must have worked it all out okay because the cake turned out fantastic! (Seriously, multiplying fractions and stuff... Cripes, I sweat merely thinking about it.)
Perhaps because of the change in cocoa, I found that I needed more liquid to melt down the cocoa... "More liquid" means "more beer". Hooray! For those of you who may fear that the beer will overpower the cake you can add some water instead. (I did this my first time around because I had already drank the rest of my Guinness... Oops.) However, I thought the additional Guinness was just fine, thank you very much; it makes the cake super moist. Aside from that, I added vanilla to the cream when whipping it (whip it real good) because I la-la-love vanilla and to the frosting itself I added caramel Bailey's Irish Cream. My thoughts are, the more booze the better...when it comes to baking. (Please remember to drink responsibly, folks.)
So see my revised recipe below (click on it to enlarge) and enjoy the goodness of this cake. I recommend a milk chaser! Cheers!
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