Chocolate Guinness Cake

As I am sure you will probably recognise, this cake is Nigella Lawson’s chocolate Guinness cake. It is fabulous and proves its worth time and again. So why am I blogging about someone else’s famous recipe? Well, partly because it is so good, but also because I have had two recent commissions to make it. The first was for an 80^th birthday for a man who is Guinness mad and the second for the canteen where the market is held.

Whenever there is a celebratory event in the calendar the canteen likes to offer something different to the usual biscuits so the market bakers take it in turns to offer up cakes that they have on their market stalls or bake for commissions. In a couple of weeks I will be supplying the canteen for a combined Mother’s Day and Red Nose Day event. That’s on top of baking for the stall, so it’s going to be a very busy Wednesday and Thursday! In addition to this cake I will also be baking date and walnut, fruit loaf and banana & pecan loaf cakes for the canteen.

Anyhow back to the Guinness cake. It looks great, tastes amazing and is easy to make.

Ingredients – for the cake

250ml Guinness

250g unsalted butter

75g cocoa powder (I always use Bourneville or Green & Blacks)

400g caster sugar (I always use unrefined golden caster sugar)

142ml sour cream

2 large eggs

1 tablespoon of vanilla extract (It’s definitely worth paying for good quality vanilla extract. I use Nielsen-Massey vanilla extract.)

275g plain flour

2½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

Ingredients – for the topping

300g cream cheese (I use mascarpone)

150g icing sugar

125ml double cream

Method

Preheat your oven to 180C/160C fan/350F/gas 4. Grease a 23cm/9” loose bottomed round cake tin and line it with baking paper. I would advise using a springform tin as it makes it so much easier getting the cake out.

Pour the Guinness into a large pan and add the chopped butter. Heat it until all the butter has melted. Just a tip here – I don’t let the Guinness get too hot because you are going to be adding eggs to it later and you don’t want them curdling. Once the Guinness has just started to give off wisps of steam I take it off the heat and keep stirring it as the rest of the butter melts.

When the butter has melted beat in the caster sugar and cocoa powder until the mix is nice and smooth.

In a separate bowl beat together the sour cream, eggs and vanilla extract. When it has all been blended beat the cream, eggs & vanilla mixture into the pan mixture.

You should have a nice rich, dark brown, sweet smelling soup in the pan now. Sift the flour and bicarbonate of soda into this and beat everything together until smooth. Pour the batter into your tin and place on the middle shelf of your oven. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour. It is ready when a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

This is a very runny batter and I always have a little dribble of mix leaking out of the tin, don’t worry about it, but do make sure you have some silver foil on the bottom of your oven to catch it.

When it is done your cake will have cracks in the top, don’t worry you are going to cover those with the fabulous topping and nobody will ever know, what’s more when they taste the cake they certainly won’t care!

Leave it to cool completely in the tin before you take it out. I normally put it on the side to cool overnight and remove it the following morning. You risk breaking the cake if it is not totally cold.

For the icing – add the cream cheese to a large bowl and beat until smooth. Sift in the icing sugar making sure you get rid of any lumps and beat it into the cream cheese. Lastly beat in the double cream. I usually pour the cream in slowly and constantly beat at the same time. Once everything is fully combined use a spatula to liberally cover the top of the cake. Stand back and admire your handiwork!

Update – the feedback from both the birthday celebration and the canteen was a very definite thumbs up. In fact the market feedback was so good I am now going to see how well the recipe fares being turned into muffin sized individual cakes so that I can sell them on the stall. I might need to adapt it a bit so I’ll keep you posted.