Home Cooking: Baking With Guinness Beer

(image from Guinness)

This is my colleagues favorite beer. He doesn't like the idea of using it for anything else aside from drinking it. So, as my birthday gift to him, I shall attempt to draw out a good, long "NOOOOOOOO!!!" from him by using it in making his birthday cupcake.

Going through various sites that display recipes for Guinness cakes, I ended up choosing that of Nigella Lawson's which called for the following ingredients:

Cake:

• 250 ml Guinness
• 250 g unsalted butter
• 75 g cocoa powder
• 400 g caster sugar
• 142 ml sour cream

Cream Cheese Frosting

• 300 grams cream cheese
• 150 grams Icing sugar

• 2 medium eggs
• 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
• 275 g Plain flour
• 2.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda

• 125 ml double cream (or whipping cream)
  

Most of the recipes that I saw using Guinness used the stout variant, I opted for the draught one to commemorate birthday boy.

The instructions were pretty simple to follow. If you're planning to make a cake from this recipe, one batch baking, you just need to fill the pan half-full only (most instructions would say 3/4 full) as this batter doubles in size if used immediately after preparing the batter. If you're going to bake this batter in batches, like making cupcakes, only the first batch is half-full. The next batches can be 3/4 full because the longer the uncooked batter is rested, the rising properties of the batter diminishes.

The one thing that I like about this batter is that it produces this really dark cake making the contrast between that and the frosting visually appealing. Also, you won't be able to taste the beer flavor anymore as the alcohol content has already burned off.

So, did I meet my objectives with this cake? Aside from the rest of my colleagues asking for the recipe of the cupcakes, birthday boy had his share, gave me a "NOOOOOO!!!" and 2 bottles of Guinness Stout for future culinary adventures. Now, that's mission accomplished!