Chocolate Guinness Cake

This weekend we celebrated the 30th birthday of Frank, my significant other. I organised a double surprise party: the first surprise were his parents coming over from abroad, the second one was a party with all his friends from far and wide. The surprised expressions on his face were priceless :). During the day we had to keep him busy, so we send him to the Heineken experience in Amsterdam together with my brother (being a tourist in his own country), so I could make this cake in secrecy…

He likes special beers a lot, he even brewed some himself already! For his previous birthdays we went on weekend trips to small breweries. Now I had to organise a party and ofcourse beer would be the theme. Since the theme was beer, I wanted to make a cake with beer. All of a sudden I remembered the guinness cake we once ate on our trip in Ireland. That would be the perfect cake! So I searched for a guinness cake on Pinterest and found the perfect recipe for a beautiful dark chocolate guinness cake with delicious frosting that looks like the foam head of a beer (see source of the recipe below). The stucture of the cake is just perfect, I’ve never made something alike. The guests also liked it very much: a true success story.

The only ingredient that might be a little hard to obtain is bicarbonate (soda). When you can’t find it in the supermarket you can find it at the drugstore.

---

Chocolate Guinness Cake

Serves about 12 slices, takes about 1½ hours (45 min baking time, 30 min preparing time)

What you need

Ingredients

Cake

250 ml guinness
250 grams unsalted butter
75 grams cocoa powder
400 grams sugar
142 ml sour cream
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
275 grams plain flower
2½ teaspoon bicarbonate (for Dutch readers: zuiveringszout)

Topping

• 300 grams cream cheese
• 150 grams icing sugar
• 125 ml whipping cream

Equipment

• Springform tin (23cm)
• Baking paper

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C and, place the baking paper at the base of the springform tin, then butter the tin on te base and sides. Grease the tin using some flour.
2. Pour the Guinness into a large saucepan, add the butter in parts and heat until the butter is melted, at which time you should whisk in the cocoa and sugar. Beat the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla and then pour into the pan with the buttery beer and finally whisk in the flour and bicarbonate.
3. Pour the cake batter into the tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin.
4. While the cake is in the oven, you can get on with the icing. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat them both together. Whip the whipping cream and add it to the cream cheese/sugar mixture.
5. After the cake has cooled competely you can ice the top of the cake so that it looks like the frothy top of the famous beer! But you’ve also made enough icing to put between two layers of cake if you like.

Source of the recipe