Apple, Guinness and Cheese Soda Bread

How could I have been so stupid as to make this recipe, from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall without reading any of the comments attached to the published online recipe? On both the River Cottage site and the C4 site there are comments stating that there is too much liquid in the recipe as printed and that it should be 250mls of Guinness or buttermilk, not 250mls of each, and several bloggers who have also made it picked up on the published error.

Anyway - this idiot used both, and ended up with a sloppy batter which couldn't be shaped by hand. I scraped it into a large casserole dish lined with scrunched up baking parchment and got a decently shaped cob-like loaf out of it. However it didn't cook properly, even after more than an hour in a very hot oven, and the cut loaf showed both a dense, too moist texture and a line of under-baked dough at the bottom of the loaf.

The flavour combination of cheese and apple should have been great, but the loaf had a bitter after-taste which neither of us found pleasant to eat. Guinness is notorious for bitterness but I don't usually find it a problem, so I'm wondering if there was a weird interaction between the Guinness and the buttermilk.

There's a lot of potential in this soda bread so I really want to try it again, with just one of the suggested liquids, but can't really find an occasion to do so, as neither of us are eating bread at the moment, except for Saturday lunch, when I don't think Hubs would give up his crusty baguette.

I was going to enter this quick soda bread into this month's Tea Time Treats challenge, which is for breads, but as the recipe was a failure, and we didn't even like the flavour of the finished loaf, it hardly seems right to do so!

Chocolate Guinness Cake - We Should Cocoa

The theme for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge has been set by Lucy of The KitchenMaid, and she has chosen the theme of 'fame'.

Well, putting together fame and chocolate certainly provoked a lot of thought on my part - it can have such a wide interpretation. Famous recipes? Recipes named after famous people or places? There are plenty of recipes out there, but nothing seemed very appealing. I rejected the original Toll House cookie recipe, Sachertorte, Nanaimo Bars (done those already) and several others.

It wasn't until I reached into the back of a cupboard, for a tin of Guinness stout for a beef casserole, that inspiration struck. A chocolate recipe containing a famous ingredient! What could be more famous worldwide than the drink Guinness?

Nigella's chocolate Guinness cake is the first recipe to come up on a Google search, but I didn't have any sour cream. The second recipe needed buttermilk, also not in stock, but the third, from Delicious,  looked OK, and also had the advantage of cutting down the sugar quite a bit. The accompanying photo looked good too  - the frosting made the cake look like a glass of Guinness with a good head!

Making the cake itself went quite smoothly, although my batter wasn't pourable. The cake rose well, but sank a little in the middle on cooling. I wasn't too worried about this as the photo accompanying the recipe showed a sunken centre to the cake!

The frosting was a different story! I've told my husband that if I ever pick a recipe which melts white chocolate again he has to forcibly restrain me from making it! After half an hour in a double boiler, the white chocolate (Menier brand) still showed no signs of melting and looked distinctly scorched in places. I was about to throw it away and start again when I read a tip online about adding a little butter or vegetable oil. Two tablespoons of sunflower oil worked it's magic, and loosened up the chocolate. I had to pick out one or two large scorched lumps which showed no signs of melting, and the molten chocolate was still a little grainy, but I went ahead and used it. I didn't have any sour cream, so used 4 tablespoons of fromage frais in the frosting instead. The resulting white chocolate cheesecake frosting was deliciously sweet and creamy..

The cake texture was soft and quite crumbly, but not dry. The flavour was delicious, not too sweet and very chocolatey. It definitely needed the sweetness of the frosting to contrast with the slight bitterness of the Guinness in the cake.

We Should Cocoa is a monthly cooking challenge which brings together chocolate in some form with a specially chosen ingredient. Originally hosted by Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog and Chele of Chocolate Teapot, the challenge now often uses guest hosts, as with Lucy The KitchenMaid, this month. Lucy will post a round up at the end of the month, although entries so far can be seen on this link to the challenge.

Guinness Gingerbread - from Tea with Bea

This recipe comes from the gorgeous new baking book 'Tea with Bea', which I received in the post this week from  Dom at Belleau Kitchen, after winning one of his generous give-aways. I could happily cook and eat any of the recipes in the book - they all sound delicious and are really well photographed. Thanks Dom - that's another few inches on the hips!

I decided to start with a recipe using oil instead of butter, to be in keeping with my current scheme of baking with less saturated fat. The recipe for gingerbread Guinness cupcakes suggested variations to make it into larger layer cakes, so I decided to make a larger tray bake (25 x 25cm) in a single layer, and not use the cream cheese topping. You can read about Tea with Bea, the author, Bea Vo, and see this recipe here, on the publisher's blog.

Despite it being a relatively simple recipe, I still managed to make a mistake which I worried would spoil the cake - I added a whole tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda to the Guinness and treacle mixture - no wonder it frothed so much! You really do need to heed the warning to use a tall saucepan, even with the right amount of soda. However, this extra soda couldn't be tasted in the finished cake, which was my main worry, and didn't appear to affect the cake adversely in any other way.

Another point to mention, which I didn't notice until after I'd cooked the cake, is that the temperatures given in the recipes are for a fan oven - I find this quite unusual, as most recipes are still written either for conventional ovens, or give both temperatues in the text. This didn't seem to have any effect on my cake, even though I cooked it on a lower than specified temperature.

I decorated the cake with a drizzle of glacé icing and some slices of crystallised ginger, as a the cream cheese frosting in the recipe is too rich for an everyday cake, and doesn't fit in with the less saturated fat effort! The cake itself was very light but still managed to be moist and sticky. The combination of spices used was really good - the cloves and allspice  gave a good depth of flavour and the amount of ginger gave a real kick to the flavour! We all liked this cake a lot, so I'm sure the recipe will be used again, with no mistakes next time, and a slightly smaller tin, I think, to give a deeper cake.

Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread

I really like finding recipes which have obviously used oil right from the start, rather than recipes which have been adapted by replacing butter. I can be more optimistic that they are going to work well and give results as good as a recipe using butter, rather than something which is a compromise. I can't say this recipe, from Epicurious, was perfect, but the flavour and texture were really very good. The amount of ground ginger looks alarming, but it wasn't too much for what is quite a large cake.

I made a few changes to the recipe - some planned, but one inadvertent - but nothing major which might affect how the recipe worked. I used an ale rather than a stout beer (Abbott Ale from Greene King) as I'd used half a 500ml can in a casserole the day before. I didn't add cardamom, as Hubs doesn't like it, and in my haste, forgot to add the nutmeg. As I'm in the UK, I used black treacle instead of molasses.

After reading some of the more recent of the 200+ comments on the recipe I also added half a teaspoon of salt; there's something in a corner of my mind which says that American flours often have added salt! In addition, I dusted the greased bundt pan with cocoa - that seems an excellent tip for dark cakes, to avoid those white patches of dry cooked flour that sometimes appear on cakes - and was really generous with the butter, in an effort to avoid the common problem of sticking.

I still had a little sticking around the very bottom of the pan, but it only pulled away a very shallow layer of the cake - just the sticky 'skin' really. I was going to add some icing to hide this, but before I could do this, or photograph the cake, nearly half of it had been eaten. Adding a frosting doesn't seem worth the effort now, just for a prettier photograph, although it might have alleviated the problems, also mentioned by C at Cake, Crumbs and Cooking, of photographing plain brown cakes!

The cake initially rose well, but by the time it was cooked - at 60 minutes, rather than the 50 suggested in the recipe - it was beginning to shrink back and looked oddly wrinkled on top. Fortunately, with  a bundt cake, the top isn't seen when it's turned out!

This gingerbread is so dark that it's almost black, and is one of those which gets sticky with time. It's moist and close-textured, but is surprisingly light. It contains a frightening amount of sugar, but needs the ordinary sugar to counteract the bitterness of the black treacle(molasses). The balance of spices (allowing for me not using the nutmeg and cardamom) seems very good - but I'll try to remember the nutmeg next time!

Black Beer Gingerbread

This is Nigella Lawson's recipe, which I saw her cook this week on her current TV Series, 'Kitchen'. The Black Beer refers to stout such as Guinness, of course. She cut the gingerbread into small cubes, piled it haphazardly on a platter and stuck on a few Christmas cake decorations of small plastic fir trees and deer, before giving it a liberal dusting of icing sugar. The result suggested a rugged, wintry wasteland - but somehow it was still Christmassy.

I'm not sure whether I will go that far for my Christmas table (I'm not even sure I have any cake decorations), but this seemed an ideal cake to have around over Christmas. Gingerbread gets better with time and will easily last the whole week, if it's not eaten sooner.

I could only find the recipe online with cup measurements, so I'll list the metric 'translation' too:

150g butter

300g golden syrup
200g dark muscovado sugar
250ml stout - I used Murphy's
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda
300mls sour cream
2 large eggs

The recipe was simple to follow and everything was mixed in the saucepan used to melt the butter and sugars together, so it was easy on washing up too. I used an 11 inch square pan, as I didn't have the exact size specified in the recipe, and cut the gingerbread into 36 very small squares. I think I would cut it into larger pieces if it wasn't going to be part of a Christmas feast, when many people like small tastes of everything.

To be honest, I found the finished product slightly disappointing. It wasn't as dark as my usual gingerbread recipe, which uses a large proportion of black treacle as well as golden syrup. The beatings at each stage of mixing gave the surface of the cake a very strange holey appearance, almost as if excess gas was trying to escape. The recipe I usually use stresses not to beat the mixture; now I know why! The flavour was complex, and not too sweet, with the sour cream and stout countering the sweetness of the large amounts of sugar and syrup; I liked that result! The texture was quite light, but the cake had a slightly layered appearance, getting denser towards the bottom, as if that escaping gas was what should have been contributing to the light texture, but too much got away!

The delicious flavour just about redeems this recipe and makes it one to make again, although I think I'll go a little lighter on the whisking next time!

In fairness to Nigella, the surface of the cake looked better the next day, and most of the holes had disappeared, although the top to bottom texture still looked a little uneven. I don't think this shows on the photograph, though.

I've still got mincepies and two desserts to make, but those results won't be posted until after Christmas Day. In the meantime.....

......I wish you all a very Happy Christmas!

Chocolate Guinness Brownies

Most of the online recipes for Chocolate Guinness Brownies are remarkably similar, and they seem to be based on this recipe for what are called 'Grace Neill's Chocolate and Guinness Brownies' originally published  in "The New Irish Table" by Margaret M. Johnson. Adaptations use more flour, add chocolate chips, play around with the types of chocolate used and bake in a larger pan, but are essentially this recipe.

Having baked them, I can understand why most people use a larger pan - these were too deep for brownies, and it's not often I have that complaint about a recipe - the reverse is usually true! It's difficult, without trying alternatives, to see why white chocolate is used, rather than a lower cocoa solids percentage dark chocolate, but I'm guessing that the extra cocoa butter affects the texture. I used 4oz of white chocolate, 3oz of 85% chocolate and 5oz of 72% chocolate which has extra cocoa butter (Green and Black's 'Chocolate for Cooks'). I also used Murphy's Irish Stout instead of Guinness, but otherwise I followed the recipe exactly, although I added a couple of minutes to the baking time as they didn't seem done at 25 minutes.

Having had two tasting sessions now, I still can't decide if I like them! If someone had handed me a dessert plate, with a slice of this brownie, a drizzle of chocolate sauce and a neat quenelle of sweetened whipped cream, and called it a 'Chocolate and Guinness Terrine' or something similar, I would have been really pleased, but I can't reconcile either the taste or the texture with what I know as a brownie.

It's not very sweet, for one thing. This isn't something I usually complain about, but in this case, the bitterness of the stout beer and the large amount of cocoa, isn't balanced with enough sugar. The stout isn't evident as a flavour, but gives a subtle overtone of bitterness. Then there's the texture - it's very close textured, but in a mousse-y way rather than a cake crumb way. I don't mind dense brownies, but here the close texture doesn't give a dense fudgy feel in the mouth. When eaten it feels light but cloying - there's not much of substance there to chew on - a very difficult sensation to describe. Anyway, it's a texture that's fine for a dessert, but not a cake, if you can see what I'm getting at! Having said all that, it's not an unpleasant flavour, unless you really need more sweetness. I don't think I'm likely to make these again, given the number of better brownie recipes I have, although it's worth noting the recipe for an unusual dinner party dessert!

Chocolate, Stout and Raisin Slice

A bit of a misnomer, this, as I left out the raisins! This is one of Dan Lepard's recent recipes, originally published in Sainsbury's Magazine, which has received much acclaim from bloggers such as Choclette and Joanna at Zeb Bakes. As with many of Dan's recipes, it's an unusual method, starting with making a sort of porridge by cooking oats and cocoa in stout. However it's a simple 'mix in the pan' recipe which isn't difficult to follow. The cake tin size isn't mentioned in the online recipe, but the original recipe states a 20cm (8") square tin.

I left out the dried fruit because the Chief Tester (and biggest eater!) doesn't really like it in cakes, and added my own stout-flavoured frosting, as the one in the recipe looked far too sweet and over-generous for our tastes. I didn't have Guinness available, so used Murphy's Irish Stout, which I keep in stock for winter casseroles. For the frosting, I melted 175g plain chocolate with 30g butter in a small saucepan, then removed the pan from the heat and stirred in 2 tablespoons of golden syrup and 3 tablespoons of stout. I cooled this until it just held it's shape, then spread it over the cold cake.

The recipe produces a dense, moist, and (dare I say it?) chewy cake, which might not be to everyone's taste. It doesn't taste very sweet, as the sugar is counterbalanced by the flavour of the stout, so the very sweet looking frosting from the recipe may not have been as OTT as it first seemed on reading the recipe - in retrospect, a few moist, sweet, plump raisins or cherries dotted around might be an improvement too (although not from CT's point of view!). That reads as if I didn't like the cake, which isn't the case. I enjoyed it a lot and would like to try it again with the dried fruit added; I'm just trying to be objective about it. As it is such a robust cake, it would probably travel well (without the frosting), so would make a good addition to a picnic.

Chocolate Guinness Cake

I didn't have all the ingredients to make Nigella Lawson's Chocolate Guinness Cake, which seems to get consistently good reviews, so I decided to tackle Delia Smith's recipe instead.

You'll see, when you compare my photo with the one shown with the recipe, what was wrong with the cake - it didn't rise well and the quantities given for the frosting and filling were very sparse. It was also a crumbly but sticky cake (how is that possible?), so it was difficult to turn out of the sandwich tins. I added the chopped walnuts to the filling, but decided not to use them on top.

The texture was moist and dense, and the flavour was fine, although nothing special, and the frosting was not as richly chocolatey as I'd expected, considering the high proportion of chocolate added. Sometimes I think that cocoa gives a better flavour in frostings.

I'm not sure I'd bother to make this again, but if I did, I think I'd try making it in 7" sandwich tins to give a deeper cake and the illusion of more filling and frosting.

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.