Chocolate Guinness Cake · Nigella Lawson

Name: Chocolate Guinness Cake · Nigella Lawson
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 12
Cuisine: British
Ingredients: 250ml Guinness; 250g Unsalted butter; 75g Cocoa powder; 400g Caster sugar; 150ml Sour cream; 2 Eggs; 2.5 tsp Vanilla extract; 275g Plain flour; 2.5 tsp Bicarbonate of soda; 300g Cream cheese — for the topping; 150g Icing sugar — for the topping; 2 tsp Cornflour — for the topping; 125ml Double cream — for the topping

A whole cake made in one saucepan: stout and butter melted together, cocoa and sugar whisked in, and a cream cheese icing swirled over the top so the whole thing looks like a pint of Guinness.

来源

食谱提供 Nigella Lawson · ⭐ 名人 · British food writer and television cook, author of How to Eat, How to be a Domestic Goddess and Feast

厨师与创作者的姓名仅用于标注出处。More Recipes Please 独立运营，与他们没有任何合作、赞助或代言关系。

Nigella Lawson (nigella.com) — Published on Nigella Lawson's own website, credited to her 2004 book FEAST and yielding about 12 slices. It is her own creation rather than a traditional recipe: she writes that the large amount of sugar is there to offset any bitterness from the stout, and that she chose a cream cheese frosting — loosened with cream, which she notes is unconventional — specifically so the finished cake would echo the pale head on a glass of Guinness. Notably, the entire batter is mixed in the same saucepan the butter was melted in.

厨师: Nigella Lawson

Watch it being made

Nigella Lawson

⏱ 90 分钟🍽 12 人份🔥 520 大卡🇬🇧 英国

素食

步骤

Heat the oven to 180°C / 160°C fan / gas 4. Butter a 23cm springform tin and line the base with baking paper.
Pour the 250ml of Guinness into a large, wide saucepan and add the 250g of butter in slices. Warm over gentle heat, just until the butter has melted — no need to boil it.
💡 Use a bigger pan than you think you need — the entire cake gets mixed in it, and stout foams up when it warms. A wide pan also cools faster before the eggs go in.
Take the pan off the heat and whisk in the 75g of cocoa and the 400g of caster sugar until you have a smooth, glossy, dark liquid with no lumps of cocoa left.
In a separate bowl or jug, beat the 150ml of sour cream with the 2 eggs and the vanilla until evenly combined.
💡 Make sure the beery mixture is no more than warm before this goes in. Pour eggs into a hot pan and you get sweet scrambled egg — the one genuinely unfixable mistake in this recipe.
Pour the sour cream mixture into the pan and whisk it into the chocolate-stout base.
Finally whisk in the 275g of flour and the 2½ teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, stopping the moment the batter is smooth. It will look alarmingly thin and sloppy — that is exactly right.
💡 Stop whisking as soon as the flour disappears. Keep going and you develop gluten, which turns a damp, tender cake into a chewy one. Thin batter is the point, not a mistake to be corrected with more flour.
Pour the batter into the lined tin and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour. It is done when the top is set and springs back, and a skewer in the centre comes out with a few damp crumbs on it.
Leave the cake to cool COMPLETELY in its tin on a rack. Do not try to turn it out while warm.
💡 This is a deliberately damp cake and it has almost no structure while hot — it will crack straight across or break in half. The springform tin is doing the holding. Wait.
When the cake is properly cold, sit it on a flat plate or cake stand and make the topping: whip the 300g of cream cheese on its own until smooth.
Sieve the 150g of icing sugar and the 2 teaspoons of cornflour over the cheese and beat them in.
If you are using double cream, add it now and beat until it reaches a thick, spreadable consistency. If you are using whipping cream instead, whisk it separately to soft peaks first, beat a couple of spoonfuls into the cheese to loosen it, then fold in the rest.
💡 Stop the moment it is spreadable. Cream cheese and cream both split if you beat them too long — the icing goes grainy and starts to weep, and there is no way back.
Ice the TOP of the cake only, leaving the dark sides bare, and swirl the surface flat-ish so it reads as the pale head sitting on a dark pint.
💡 Resist the urge to ice the sides. The whole visual joke — dark body, pale head — only works if the sides stay black.
Cut into about 12 slices and serve. It keeps well for several days, and the crumb stays damp.

💡 小贴士

Beginner's mistake: icing a cake that only feels cool. Any warmth at all melts a cream cheese topping into a puddle that slides off the sides. If you are in a hurry, chill the cooled cake in the fridge for 30 minutes first.
Substitution: any stout or porter works in place of Guinness — the cake wants the dark-malt bitterness, not the brand. Nigella herself says the cake is gorgeous left plain, so if you would rather skip the topping entirely, that is her suggestion, not a compromise.
A springform tin is genuinely required here, not merely preferred. The cake is too damp and fragile to invert out of a solid tin, and there is no rescuing it once it breaks.
You cannot really taste beer in the finished cake — it reads as a deep, faintly metallic darkness, like gingerbread that forgot the spices. If someone at your table dislikes stout, don't tell them what is in it until after they have had a slice.