The Galley

I haven’t posted anything here in a while since I haven’t really had anything worth sharing, but my latest project is worth coming out of retirement for.

Yesterday, September 24th, was Arthur Guinness’s birthday. Some of you may know him as the founder of the Guinness brewery. As this year also marks the 250th anniversary of Guinness, I felt that I needed to do something special to mark the occasion. As it was a birthday after all, what better tribute than a cake.  I already had a rum cake recipe, so I decided to adapt it to the task. Since Guinness and chocolate go well together, I also decided to replace the standard yellow cake mix with a chocolate variety.

The Recipe

Ingredients:
For the cake:

1 cup chopped, toasted pecans or walnuts
1 18-1/2 ounce chocolate cake mix*
1 1-3/4 ounce (4-serving size) instant chocolate pudding mix
4 eggs
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup Guinness Draught**

For the glaze:

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup Guinness Draught, seperated**

*: I used the most basic ‘chocolate’ cake I could find, thinking that anything more complex, like super fudge supreme or anything of that nature would lend too strong of a chocolate flavour to the cake.

**: You could probably use Guinness Extra Stout instead of the Draught, but I prefer the draft. The extra CO2 provided by the widget seems to make for a slightly sweeter beer, and may have even helped lead to a lighter texture than I would have otherwise had.

Preparation:
Cake: Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease and flour 12-cup Bundt pan. Sprinkle nuts on bottom of pan. Combine all cake ingredients. Beat for 2 minutes on high with electric mixer. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool in pan. Invert on serving plate. Prick top with fork. Drizzle glaze over top of cake. Use brush or spoon to put extra dripping back on cake.

Glaze: Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in 1/2 cup Guinness and sugar. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and stir in remaining 1/4 cup Guinness

My thoughts:

While the cake didn’t end up with as strong of a Guinness flavour as rum cakes normally have rum flavour, it had a very nice mix of chocolate and malty flavours. I think the only modification I’ll try next time is replacing the water in the batter with Guinness, giving a full cup of Guinness to the batter.

What better time to start a new blog than the new year, right? Who cares if it’s not the same new year as the Gregorian calendar uses. That just makes it more fun.

As a celebration of the Lunar New Year, Ang and I cooked a pseudo-Chinese feast (feast in the amount of left overs we have) consisting of jiaozi dumplings, crab rangoon (Ang’s favourite oriental food), satay-esque kababs of beef and shrimp, and rice.

As you can see, we’re not that good at folding “proper” shapes yet, so the jiaozi are just half-circles and the rangoon are triangles.

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