This Sunday morning's baking is a chocolate stout cake. I used to have doubts about beer in cake, but then one of my college roommates had a Guinness chocolate cake as her wedding cake. It was so scrumptious, I demanded she get the recipe from her friend (who made it for the wedding) the very next day. Yay, you got married, but what I really care about is the cake! I made it pretty much immediately upon my return home, and had to share it with my co-workers so that I didn't eat the whole thing myself. It's funny, I don't like beer as a beverage, but I love it in food. Beer cake, beer bread, beer-braised hamburgers, beer can chicken, Guinness stew, steamed mussels in beer.... bring on the beer.
Back to the concept of beer in cake - I was really excited when I saw that the Baked guys had a chocolate stout cake and, even better, I didn't miss out on making it for the scheduled Baked Sunday Morning today. Since it was from Matt and Renato, I assumed it would be even better than the Guinness cake I'd made before. Here's the thing... it wasn't as good. Don't get me wrong, it was still very delicious. But it wasn't .as. delicious (at least according to my taste buds' memory). They are two very different cakes, in terms of ingredients. Obvious differences are the Baked bundt uses a combination of 75% butter + 25% canola oil, while the other one is a layer cake and relies on 100% vegetable oil. The Baked recipe requires more beer, a combination of sugars and less sugar overall, a mix of sour cream and heavy cream for dairy rather than Greek yogurt, and cocoa powder plus dark chocolate instead of cocoa powder and espresso powder. The frostings are different as well - Baked's uses a cream cheese Bailey's & whiskey glaze while A Beautiful Bite uses a Bailey's buttercream. Clearly, they are very different recipes and the thing to do would be to make both, and eat a slice of each (to properly judge them).
Assuming you have a bottle of stout and Bailey's, this cake and its accompanying frosting are quite simple (especially compared with some of the other cakes from Baked). I did have a little difficulty with this cake, as I had with their Black Cocoa Cake, where, despite meticulous coating of butter and cocoa powder, part of the cake didn't come out of the pan. This is an issue with a number of the bundt cakes I've made from them, so you'd think I'd know better by now how to avoid it. Although it's embarrassing from a serving standpoint, it's not like it affected the taste at all. My other issue was my frosting turned out quite a bit thicker than the occupying photo, but that would have been easy to fix by adding a little more Bailey's.
Find the chocolate stout cake recipe and see the vastly prettier efforts of other bakers at Baked Sunday Mornings.
I want to hear more about how it compares with the other recipe! That black cocoa cake is a pain to get out of the pan - even the food stylists at the book shoot had issues and had to remake at least twice. I switched to one of the Williams Sonoma gold bundt pans, and go crazy with Baking Pam and that seems to work. But I was a bit nervous about this one too!
I also had issues with too-thick frosting. Yours is super pretty, though!