Tuesday 29 September 2009

Guinness Cake

This isn't a pretty or delicate cake; you probably won't want it on your tea-table alongside the bone china, cucumber sandwiches and fondant fancies. However, it does have a really fantastic flavour, and if you need something in the cake tin for elevenses, hungry children, visiting workmen and so on, this might be worth a try,

This Guinness cake recipe is taken from Mark Hix's weekly column in the Independent newspaper - he suggests serving it as a pudding, with icecream. It's a very straighforward recipe; my only dilemma was whether to cook it in a 20 or 23cm diameter tin. I chose the larger size as the weight of the ingredients seemed to add up to a lot, but a 20cm tin would have been fine too.


As you can see, adding Guinness doesn't make the cake very dark. The orange flavour is obvious when you first taste it, but the Guinness, lemon and spices blend with the orange to give a very subtle, unusual flavour. I guess you could add a drizzle of glacé icing to pretty it up a bit.

3 comments:

Debs @ DKC said...

Like the sound of this. As you say, you could add a drizzle of icing to pretty it up. Perhaps you could add guinness to the icing too?

Suelle said...

I was trying to decide what flavours would be good in a frosting or glacé icing, Debs. Lemon is one possibility, as you have spare lemon juice after zesting. The spice flavours make me think of coffee and maple syrup, for some reason, but adding a completely new flavour might be too much.

Interesting idea about using Guinness - the colour might be a little odd, although the bitterness might add a good flavour note.

Alicia Foodycat said...

I was expecting it to look like Nigella's guinness cake!

A friend of mine used to make guinness icecream - she reduced the guinness right down to a syrup. I think a bit of that added to a caramel icing would be good.