Guinness Cake
A birthday cake for a neighbor, friend, chocolate lover and Guinness enthusiast, whose little girl likes to press on the surface of such cakes until riddling them with holes, all the while repeating what I think is, “Why is it not soft?” in French; to which I can only reply, “It’s hardened chocolate,” and yield the same response over and over again because she doesn’t understand a word I say. What I do know, however, is that after eating it, she spontaneously learned to exclaim, “It’s deeelicious!” in English. This cake: so good, it turns a French girl into an Irish lass, if only for a wee moment.
Maybe it’s because I made the thing, but I really do think you can taste the Guinness in it. Kids ate it without complaint and I had to convince people that I wasn’t crazy, but there’s a little something going on there that isn’t chocolate. Maybe if you didn’t know it was a Guinness cake, you wouldn’t be all, “Hey, did you pour stout in the batter?” but it does add its own dimension to the mix. Sometimes, that added dimension, from an ingredient someone can’t quite place, is what makes a cake truly special and deeelicious!
- One 440ml can of Guinness
- 250g unsalted butter, softened
- 2 cups sugar
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 2 eggs
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon instant espresso
- 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
- 2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
- pinch of salt
- 1 cup 35% heavy cream
- 250g 70% dark chocolate, finely chopped
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Liberally grease a springform pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.
- Pour the Guinness into a saucepan and reduce over medium heat until it equals one cup (250ml).
- Meanwhile, beat together the butter, sugar, sour cream, eggs and vanilla together until light and fluffy.
- Add the reduced Guinness to the wet ingredients in a steady stream while continuing to mix, then fold in the cocoa, espresso, flour, baking soda and a pinch of salt.
- Pour the batter into the prepared springform pan and bake in the center of the oven until completely set, about an hour.
- When the cake is done (a toothpick should be able to be inserted into it with only crumbs, not batter attached), remove it from the oven and allow it to cool completely before demoulding and preparing to glaze.
- When the cake has cooled, carefully run a knife around the outside to loosen any stuck bits and unhinge the springform pan. Carefully level the top of the cake with a serrated knife (these crunchier bits are the baker’s reward, in my opinion), then turn the cake over, peel off the parchment paper and reveal a perfectly smooth cake top.
- To make the dark chocolate ganache, heat the heavy cream until just boiling over medium heat (you can use the same pot as the Guinness), place the dark chocolate into a bowl and pour the heavy cream over it. Give it a minute, then stir vigorously with a wooden spoon or spatula until smooth and satiny.
- To coat the cake, you can do what I should’ve done and put the cake on a rack over parchment paper and pour the still warm glaze over the cake, allowing it to drip down all the sides and then cool to a smooth and shiny surface. OR you can do what I actually did, which is allow it to cool and then painfully try to apply hardening ganache to a soft cake, eventually swearing alone in your kitchen and resulting in a sort of haphazardly applied layer of truffle to the outside of the cake.
You can use the leftover ganache to make Truffles!