Recipe | Sooty cake (aka Guinness and chocolate cake!)

Posted in Baking by

Don’t worry if you don’t like Guinness. This is a dense, moist, slightly malty chocolate cake even those who don’t love the black stuff can enjoy!

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake with chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate shavings cut view

This recipe is from my recipe book. Which obviously means I got it from my mum at some point!

Ingredients (makes 8 very generous slices!)

  • 125 g / 4 oz butter
  • 250 g / 8 oz caster sugar
  • 250 g / 8 oz plain flour
  • 250 ml stout (I used Guinness, but other dark beers are available!)
  • 2 eggs
  • 25g / 1 oz cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake with chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate shavings top view

Method

To make your sooty cake use a 20-cm (8 inch) springform cake tin. I greased the sides of the tin and lined the bottom with greaseproof paper. Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees C / 160 degrees C fan/ Gas Mark 4 / 350 degrees F.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake preparing your springform baking tin

Cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the eggs to this mixture, one at a time, and beat the mixture well until they are combined.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake just out of oven mixture in progress

Sieve the cocoa powder into a separate bowl. Pour a little of the stout (i.e. Guinness) into the bowl and blend the cocoa in. Add the rest of the stout and stir in.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake adding the stout to the cocoa powder

In another bowl, sift the flour and bicarb of soda together.

Stir the contents of these last two bowls alternatively into the butter, sugar and egg mix. Stir until you have a smooth mixture.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake adding parts of mixture together

Pour the mixture into the tin. Sit your tin on a baking tray (in case any mixture leaks out during baking) and bake for 70 minutes or until firm to the touch.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake before baking

A note on cooking time: you know your oven best. My oven seems to be far hotter than the number on the dial. After 3o minutes, I had to make my Guinness cake a tinfoil hat to stop the top burning. However, this cake really does need over an hour to cook all the way through.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake just out of oven

Leave the cake to cool in the tin for 10-15 minutes, turn out onto a wire rack, and peel off the lining paper. Leave to cool completely.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake without decoration

You can decorate your sooty cake as you like. I decided to use a chocolate buttercream on the top and white chocolate shavings. For the buttercream I blended together 65 g butter and 130 g icing sugar until smooth. I then added 25 g of melted dark chocolate and blended again until stirred through evenly. I spread it over the top of the Guinness cake using a palette knife.

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake with chocolate buttercream icing

For the white chocolate shavings, I just took a vegetable peeler to a bar of white chocolate. It’s the easiest method and very effective!

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake with chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate shavings

You don’t have to be a Guinness drinker to enjoy this cake. It’s delicious and, strangely enough, when cut has a slight red sheen. Lovely!

recipe for sooty cake guinness cake with chocolate buttercream icing and white chocolate shavings a slice

 

If you’re looking for other chocolate cake recipes, you could try:

Chocolate fudge cake with chocolate buttercream icing cut view

 

My chocolate fudge cake.

 

 

 

Heavenly chocolate cake with fudge frosting white chocolate shavings and gold sugar stars cut

 

 

Mary Berry’s heavenly chocolate cake with fudge icing.

 

 

 

Claire Huston / Art and Soul

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52 thoughts on “Recipe | Sooty cake (aka Guinness and chocolate cake!)”

  7. Oh this looks lovely too. Maybe I should whack it together tomorrow as a back up to the Easter cake. Hmm i had a disaster with that one earlier (more than the sunken saga which I think might have been over beating on reflection…). I didn’t let it cool in the tin and it broke up on exit…eek!! I’m going to attempt to stick it together with icing tomorrow and ignore the gaping hole in the middle! The broken off bit i tried tastes scrummy. Anyway why I’m burbling about a different cake on this post I don’t know! But I will most certainly be trying this one, sounds really easy (not tomorrow…the other one will be a delight, just not visually). Xx

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    • It’s quite an easy one to put together, it’s at the baking stage when things can go wrong! I think I’m going to make some brownies next because they’re so easy and you don’t have to worry about whether they rise or not 🙂

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