Chocolate Guinness Cake

Chocolate Guinness Cake

Curiosity got the better of the cat and I ended up making the chocolate Guinness cake. It turned out very well, although the taste of Guinness wasn’t as prominent as I’d have liked it to be. Nevertheless it made for a great chocolate cake – moist, dense, and sinfully fudgey.

I especially loved the cream cheese icing that was smothered over the cake. The slight tangy-sweet cloud of cream cheese+icingsugar+cream, calorie-packed as it was, seemed to soften yet highlight the intensity of chocolate in the cake (and trust me, it was VERY chocolatey).

It was at its best straight out of the oven, but I’ve had it in the fridge for the last 2 days and it is still delectably moist and fudgey even when cold.

Would I make it again? Yes I would, but only if I weren’t serving it to a group of girls on a diet. Does Nigella ever make anything healthy?

Which Chocolate Takes The Cake?

We’re celebrating JC’s birthday tomorrow, and I have volunteered my cake-baking expertise (or lack of) to make her a birthday cake. This is a perfect excuse to try out the treasure of chocolate cake recipes in Nigella’s Feast, but this unfortunately leaves me with another problem: which recipe should I try?

There’s the chocolate espresso cake that I made the last time (that was highly successful and a show-stealer, and is almost fail-proof), and then there’s the chocolate Guinness cake, the honey chocolate cake, etc.

I love the chocolate espresso cake for its moistness. Flavour wise, it was intense almost to the point of being dense, yet it was light and airy too (lots of eggs and only a few tablespoonfuls of flour – you do the math); at the same time the Guinness cake sounds intriguing enough to attempt, and I have read many a rave review about the cake.

So I will head home tonight and contemplate which cake my dearest JC would be getting for her birthday. That leaves me with one last consideration: how kosher is it to serve a Guinness cake at your Bible study meeting?

Food Is The Best Medicine

Nigella's Chocolate Espresso Cake

For today, I am The Sick Epicurean, quite literally. After declaring on Sunday that I had been bug-free for 2 months (to which the Jman had warned me not to jinx myself), I finally succumbed to the nasty weather fluctuations and actually fell ill. Who’d have thunk?

I spent the whole day in bed nursing a sore throat, fever and a headache until I was sick of being in bed. So instead of moping around and feeling miserable, I decided to get my blood pumping by driving myself down to the supermarket and take a walk around in the comforts of the air-conditioned aisles.

By the time I got home, I was feeling a little psyched up to cook. Supermarketing has that effect on me. So without thinking twice, I pulled out a cake mixer, pots, pans and went full on head-down-bum-up into cooking. I made a crema di funghi (cream of mushroom soup) and a spaghetti al funghi for dinner, and a Nigella chocolate-espresso cake for dessert.

I’ll post up the recipes later but for now, all I can say is that all the kitchen activity made me feel heaps better. The fever’s broken and the headache has magically disappeared. Talk about food for the soul!