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.

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.

Apart from using more crab (an 8oz package of imatation crab instead of the recommended 6.5oz can) the crab rangoon recipe we used was unchanged from the one Ang had previously found on cooks.com. One of the things I like about this recipe in particular is that it’s not as sweet as some crab rangoon recipes I’ve had in restaurants, and tastes more like crab and less like cream cheese.

Likewise the jiaozi recipe I got from Epicurious. I halved the recipe and replaced the ground pork with beef, as certain other people living here don’t particularly like pork (though I did feel bad about doing so, as it is the year of the pig), but this actually didn’t seem to affect the flavour a whole lot. Ang was also questioning the inclusion of the napa cabbage, but it definitely added a bit of additional texture and filling that was needed. Plus, it meant that at least some part of the meal included a green vegetable.

As an aside, the jiaozi cooked for a bit longer than Epicurious recommended, but this was mostly due to issues with the water taking a long time to boil and stay boiling (I think it’s cause I was anxiously watching the pot). But because of this and our inability to seal all the gyoza wrappers completely, I ended up with a pretty good broth which has since been used with some of the leftover jiaozi for a dumpling soup.

The kebabs were my own recipe, after I didn’t feel like using any of the actual satay recipes to which I have access. This consisted of marinating thirty shrimp and half a pound of thinly-sliced top round (not my first choice for meat, as it was a bit tough, but we are on a budget here), then threading them on the skewers and grilling. The marinade I used was:

2 Tbsp Soy Sauce
1/2 Tbsp lime juice
1/2 Tbsp rice vinegar
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander

If I had done this differently, I might have used more of the spices, in particular the cumin, and maybe not the vinegar (maybe rice wine or something similar, instead). They were still rather tasty, although they were cold by the time we actually sat down to eat due to the amount of time it took the dumplings to cook.