Jul 31, 2013

What's for dessert - Chocolate Guinness Cake


We've been on a healthy diet recently. By healthy I mean no wheat flour and lots of veggies and fruit and...(this always makes me depressed) little to no sweets. This is always the hardest part as we are completely addicted to sugar. Yesterday I had a bad day though and all I thought about for the whole day was chocolate cake. Oh, what a coincidence it was when I found this gorgeous recipe on bleubird's blog while reading my daily dose of blog posts. I simply had to make it, because it was chocolate but also because it was with...guinness beer. whaat? Frankly, I had to stop myself from eating the whole cake, it is this good. Even now I'm thinking that another little piece won't kill me, right? Damn you carbs! I really hate you! 



Here is the original recipe by Nigella Lawson:

(I love her cooking but she always uses way too much sugar, I used far less and it was just perfect) 

Ingredients


for the cake
250 ml guinness
250 grams unsalted butter
75 grams cocoa powder
250 grams caster sugar
142 ml sour cream
large eggs
tablespoon vanilla extract
275 grams plain flour
2 ½ teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
for the topping



300 grams cream cheese
100 grams icing sugar
125 ml double cream (or whipping cream)
optionally add 20ml of espresso or a tsp of coffee powder

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to gas mark 4/180°C/350ºF, and butter and line a 23cm / 9 inch springform tin.
  2. Pour the Guinness into a large wide saucepan, add the butter - in spoons or slices - and heat until the butter's 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 brown, buttery, beery pan and finally whisk in the flour and bicarb.
  3. Pour the cake batter into the greased and lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to an hour. Leave to cool completely in the tin on a cooling rack, as it is quite a damp cake.
  4. When the cake's cold, sit it on a flat platter or cake stand and get on with the icing. Lightly whip the cream cheese until smooth, sieve over the icing sugar and then beat them both together. Or do this in a processor, putting the unsieved icing sugar in first and blitz to remove lumps before adding the cheese.
  5. Add the cream and beat again until it makes a spreadable consistency. Ice the top of the black cake so that it resembles the frothy top of the famous pint.





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