A colleague from work celebrated his 40th birthday last (Saturday) night. The man loves chocolate, and is married to an Irish lady, so I thought it would be nice to give him a fusion of something which represents each of them. So chocolate and something very Irish... what could be more Irish than Guinness?
Hence I researched chocolate and guinness cake recipes. It seems that one of the best recipes is Nigella's version. There was a lot of rave reviews about how moist and really tasty her cake turned out to be. I managed to do only minor tweaks - after all, the basic ingredients made perfect sense - the bubbles in the beer and eggs would give an the cake a lift, but not so much so I can imagine how dense it would be...the butter and sour cream is a great tandem to ensure it is moist, and chocolate+Guinness=enough said!
I followed the recipe from Nigella's website except I added two handfuls of bitter sweet chocolate chips to the beer mixture while melting the butter. The cake batter almost reached the top of my springform tin, and gradually rised beyond the tin, but eventually puffed down after just 55 minutes of baking.
The only other change was that I sprinkled chocolate shavings over the frosting to further highlight the 'chocolatiness'!
Guinness + butter + chocolate chips melting over medium heat
chocolate plus sour cream art
cooling in tin
finished product
The cake was a huge success - it was served during the party, and I watched a lot of people (most of them I've just met that night) wolf down the slices. Empty plates with telltale crumbs and happy faces said it all - it was a rewarding experience for something that was a gift to someone else in the first place!
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