Gorgeous Guinness Cake

The next recipe I tried has become one of my absolute favourites - a Chocolate and Guinness Cake. Unsurprisingly perhaps this is yet another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery cake book but this really is one of the best. I have always loved the flavour combination of stout and chocolate, so this recipe certainly seemed like something that I would be interested in. As you can see from the photo below there is a huge number of ingredients that go into this cake mixture.

Ingredients l-r: Flour, Cocoa Powder, Sugar, Guinness, Butter, Baking Powder, Bicarbonate of Soda, Buttermilk, Eggs.

Something that is terrifying, however, is the sheer amount of butter that goes into this cake as evidenced by the photograph below:

That is a lot of butter swimming in Guinness...

The cake mixture created is a beautifully rich chocolatey mixture which poured into the cake tin very nicely. I was a little pessimistic when I saw how the mixture only filled about half the tin.

Very nice cake mixture.

I was shown at the error of my ways, however, when I eventually pulled the tin out of the oven and saw just how much the cake mixture have risen during the bake.

Ok, so that rose quite well.

One of the trickiest parts actually of the whole recipe was getting the cake out of the tin after baking. This is the first time I've used one of theses ring tins, and I soon found that I haven't quite greased it enough with the butter, and a small amount of the cake was left stuck to that in itself. This did not deter me though, and I sallied on with the recipe.

It's fine, frosting can cover a multitude of sins.

Next was making a type of frosting I have never tried before: cream cheese frosting. I must admit I was not sold on this whole idea of cream cheese frosting but I gave it a go anyway, and using my lovely new palette knife I managed to cover the entire cake very easily.

Lovely frosting, using the wonderful palette knife :-)

The results when you have a proper palette knife for icing, rather than making do with a spoon.

Once the cake was covered, it was simply a matter of dusting it is likely with some cocoa powder (or in my case smothering one section completely in Cocoa powder). As you can see from the photos, this produced a beautiful cake. And I was certainly proved wrong with my doubts regarding the cream cheese frosting. It is an absolutely beautifully tasting frosting, and it goes very nicely with the rich Guinness and chocolate sponge.

Yum! A really lovely, rich and tasty cake.

This has become another favourite recipe, and yet another success from the Hummingbird Bakery recipe book. It also went down extremely well with the physicists of the York Plasma Institute, with more than one person asking me for the recipe. That makes it a definite success in my book.

Beckie.