Nigella's Chocolate Guinness Cake

When  Janine at Cake of the Week challenged us to make something using beer for her Baking With Spirit blog event, my mind immediately went to Nigella's chocolate Guinness cake. I don't drink beer but always wondered what this cake was like - it's featured in her recipe book Feast, which I have at home. We also had a bake sale coming up at work and I figured that even if I didn't like the cake, there might be beer drinkers in my office who did! But as it turned out, the cake was absolutely delicious, and didn't particularly taste like it contained Guinness - in fact it was one of the nicest chocolate cakes I've ever made!

I think Nigella herself puts it best when she says: "This cake is magnificent in its damp blackness. I can't say that you can absolutely taste the stout in it, but there is certainly a resonant, ferrous tang which I happen to love. The best way of describing it is to say that it's like gingerbread without the spices."

The recipe is available on her website here or in her book Feast.

Measure out the Guinness

Pour into a saucepan, with 250g butter - a whole pack, which seemed like quite a lot! Allow the butter to melt and mix well.

Add 400g caster sugar and 75g cocoa powder. At this point you will have a thick, dark mixture (and you should have turned off the heat by now).

Add 142ml sour cream and mix gently. I realised too late that I was supposed to beat the sour cream with 2 eggs and a dash of vanilla first, then mix it in, but I didn't read the recipe properly. So I added the cream first, then the other ingredients - it seemed to work fine.

Slowly add 275g plain flour and 2.5 tsp bicarb of soda and carefully fold in. This is the first time I've made an entire cake in a saucepan!

Pour into the tin. Nigella's quantities state this is for a 23cm tin, though I don't know how deep hers would be. I have to admit I don't actually know how big any of my cake tins are and I just use the same one for most of my cakes - I ought to get around to measuring it! It must be smaller than 23cm though, as the tin is quite deep and I found I had enough mixture to fill two tins!

Bake for 45 mins at 180C. When the cakes come out of the oven, they are literally black! It made me think they had burned but in fact they were cooked to the perfect consistency, and still nice and soft on top - the black colour comes from the Guinness!

Here's a slightly better picture showing the black colour of the cake

To make the topping, whisk 300g cream cheese with 150g icing sugar

Add 125ml double cream and beat again until it is fairly thick

I also decided that because I had two cakes, I would sandwich them together with a chocolate filling; I used buttercream mixed with a little of the leftover sour cream.

Spread the filling on the bottom cake. I didn't go right to the edge as the cake looked fairly heavy and I didn't want the one on top to make the filling ooze out.

Spoon the topping onto the cake; the idea is that it looks like the froth on top of a pint of Guinness. Which I think it does!

Ta da.... as I said, I was very impressed by this cake and pleased that I have finally found something to do the next time I have leftover beer after a party!

I am sending this to Baking with Spirit as the ingredient this month is beer.

 

I am also sending this to the linkup party This Week's Cravings at Mom's Crazy Cooking

Beer-battered Cod

 

 

Janine at Cake of the Week runs a monthly challenge called Baking with Spirit, that chooses one alcoholic ingredient each month and lets our imaginations run wild. The challenge only started last month and I took part with these pina colada cupcakes, containing September's ingredient of rum (OK, in my case rum flavouring). I wanted to take part in the second challenge this month and was hoping it was an ingredient I would like... or at the very least not something disgusting like creme de menthe! I'm not sure whether I was pleased or disappointed when Janine chose beer! It's cheap and easily available but I don't even drink beer, let alone cook with it!

 

One of the first things that sprang to mind when I thought of beer was beer-battered fish. I happened to have just bought some cod, and I love fish and chips, so I decided to give it a go, even though I've never deep fried anything and was a little bit scared!

 

I checked out a few different recipes on the internet and decided they were all pretty much the same. The beer I used was Guinness, which does have a strong flavour (which I hate in fact) and I thought it would probably have been better to use a lighter beer, but I had half a can of Guinness left over from another recipe... which you will read about soon! I did find recipes for beer-battered fish using Guinness on the internet so I was confident it would work.

 

First I measured out the flour - a cup and a half, though this ended up making way too much, but it was the right quantity for the amount of beer I had left so decided to go with it.

 

 

Pour in half a can of Guinness, add some salt and pepper and mix well to make a batter. Leave to stand for at least 15 minutes.

Coat the fish in flour then dip in the batter. It didn't look particularly appetising at this point and I really didn't know how the sludgy batter would look anything like what you get from the chip shop!

Heat some oil in a pan - a few inches deep. This is the part I was quite nervous about, as I don't have a deep fryer and have never cooked anything in this much oil before!

I carefully slid the fish into the pan and it was fantastic - it bubbled up right away and within a matter of seconds the fish had a gorgeous golden coating. It was actually quite exciting!

I also made some tartare sauce, from a spoonful of mayo, some fat-free Greek yogurt and some capers. I cheated and used chunky chips from Tesco. I have to say that I think the taste of the Guinness did come through in the batter and as I hate Guinness, that wasn't really a good thing. But the batter was light and crisp and I was pleased with the way it turned out. I doubt I would have tried making this if it weren't for the Baking with Spirit challenge, so thanks Janine!