Chocolate Guinness Cake with a Buttery Guinness Icing

This is a wonderfully soft and moist chocolate Guinness cake, which can keep very well for about four days, as long as it’s covered, to prevent if from drying out.

This cake is extremely easy to make, but it’s very important to have all your ingredients at room temperature.

The Guinness icing comes from the Home Sweet Sweden blog, which I’ve found very appealing for two reasons: it’s not overly sweet and has more of a Guinness flavour.

• 200 ml of Guinness
• 110 g of butter, softened
• 200 g of demerara sugar
• 50 g of coca powder, sifted
• 75 ml of soured cream
• 2 large eggs
• 175 g of plain flour, sifted
• 1 1/2 of a teaspoon of baking powder, sifted

For the icing:

• 140 g of icing sugar, sifted
• 60 g of soft butter
• 4 tablespoons of Guinness beer

Preheat the oven to 180 C (160 C fan assisted oven).

Grease and line with a baking parchment a round springform cake tin, 20 cm in diameter.

Whisk the butter and the sugar until the sugar has almost dissolved.

Whisk in the eggs, one at the time, beating the mixture well before adding the second egg.

Now start adding (gradually) the coca powder whisking all the while.

Next stir in the flour, cream, baking powder and finally the Guinness.

Pour the batter into the prepared tin and bake in the preheated oven for 40-45 minutes.

Take the cake out the oven, let it cool down for about 20 minutes before removing from the tin.

Prepare the icing:

Whip the butter with the sugar until smooth. Mix in the Guinness and leave on the side until needed.

Once the Guinness cake has cooled down completely, top it with the icing spreading it evenly with the back of a spoon and decorate by sifting some cocoa powder on top.