Guinness Chocolate Fudge Cake

This cake is by far one of the best cakes that I have baked.

In the lead up to St Patrick’s Day, I really wanted to make a guinness chocolate cake, and decided to tweak my all time favourite Chocolate Fudge cake recipe from Gemma Stafford (Yes again, because she is simply amazing), by substituting the hot coffee with Guinness!

This recipe is really good also because you can do everything by hand, and it is really simple to make! The texture of the cake is light and yet so rich in chocolate.

The original chocolate fudge cake recipe can be found here.

Ingredients:

For the Guinness chocolate cake:

• 250g plain flour
• 400g sugar
• 50g cocoa powder
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 225g whole milk/ buttermilk
• 115g vegetable oil
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp coffee extract (optional)
• 225g Guinness stout

For the cream cheese frosting:

• 250g unsalted butter (softened)
• 70g cream cheese (cold)
• 450g icing sugar sifted

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180C/ Gas mark 4
2. Line three 8-inch cake pans with butter and baking paper
3. In a bowl, whisk your dry ingredients altogether
4. In another bowl, whisk in your milk, oil, vanilla and coffee extracts, and eggs
5. Then, very carefully, add in the Guinness into the wet mixture. Make sure to pour the beer as close as possible to the ingredients, because you don’t want to pour from a great height and create lots of gas
6. Carefully and slowly whisk the wet ingredients together with a fork until completely combined
7. Add in the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients in three batches and whisk
8. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean
9. While the cakes are cooling, go on and whisk the butter and cream cheese together until pale and fluffy
10. Sift in the icing sugar in three batches (I did 150g each time) and whisk until incorporated
11. When the cakes are cooled completely, ice the cake with the cream cheese frosting lightly to make a naked chocolate cake
12. For this cake, I decorated it with meringues and gold confetti (just to add to the Irish feel!)

I hope you enjoy making this! It came out perfect and I’m really really happy to have made it.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Celtic culture and when I went to Dublin with my dad in 2014, I fell in love with the place. I stayed in Trinity College Dublin, and visited Kilkenny and Wicklow. Ireland is a place steeped in folklore, history and culture. I loved the stories of leprechauns, fairy trees as well as the how Ireland progressed from the Dark Age.

Trinity College Dublin

 

 

Wicklow

 

This was taken in Glendalough, Wicklow. This area was a monastery between the 1500’s and 1600’s, but was later abandoned just before the Renaissance during the religious war between the Catholics and the Protestants. What was amazing was to see eroded and unrecognisable tombstones that had been erected since the medieval ages.

Ireland is steeped in rich cultural and religious history, yet scarred by famines, floods and pagan worship. It’s really an amazing place to visit and to learn more about the crumbling castles and bleak stories that existed during the dark age. A time with fear, uncertainty, high infant mortality, darkness and diseases. Yet, it is interesting to see how Ireland, and in particular Dublin, has emerged out of this stronger and richer, full of beautiful ruins and folklore.

This is the castle in Kilkenny. Kilkenny is a little town of 35,000 people living 2 hours out of Dublin. This castle is the biggest in Ireland, built by the rich. This is a very good example of a city that was erected by the Normans when they first invaded Ireland. Each town they built had a castle and a cathedral – the two main powers of control in the town. In the minds of the Normans, there was a power hierarchy. Power rested with God, with the church and the masters of the castle below that. Ordinary people were not part of that hierarchy, and were told that they were not awarded the stairway to heaven. I must say, the dark ages were very dark!

Apparently, according to the tour guide, this was the age where the lifespan of the common folk did not go beyond the age of 30-35 years. It didn’t help either that they were told they had no chance of salvation, neither did it help that they were illiterate and had no access to the bible. Apparently, it was during this time that the Roman Catholic Church introduced the concept of purgatory, where ordinary people could go to heaven, so long as they went through the trial of suffering and fire. I suppose this did give people some hope, but it was still a rather uncertain and hopeless one.

So it was in this town that I learned that the medieval ages was an era of fear. An era where an ordinary person was either incredibly rich, or extremely poor. It was a time where religion could not offer much, because their notion of God was not one of grace and mercy, but one of hierarchical power and rigid rules. Salvation was only for the richest and the most religious. It was a very sad time for God’s own creation, but I’m sure He had His way of saving them.

It was only when the bible became more accessible, and people began translating the bible that people realised the true message of the gospel. Kilkenny is no longer the name of a beer to me anymore!!!

Upper lake of Glendalough, Wicklow

 

Izzy