It’s midnight. I have no idea why I decided to start writing up this blog post at this time of night, but I do know that after 3 hours of baking I’m still on a bit of a baking high. Yes there is such a thing as a baking high!
On my way home from work on Friday, I was asked to bake something for a barbeque on Saturday and decided on a Guinness chocolate cake, which I naturally had no ingredients for. After a very speedy trip to the supermarket, I got hold of all the ingredients I needed and finally started baking at 9pm.
The recipe was simple enough to follow; even my tired self could cope. Half of the ingredients went onto the hob with the Guinness and were later mixed with the flour and other dry ingredients.
According to the recipe, I didn’t have a cake tin big enough, so I used two and halved the batter. Instead of greasing and dusting the cake tins, I tend to cut out a circle of greaseproof paper to fit the bottom of my cake tin and grease the sides. To be honest I’m not quite sure how I came about this method of preparation but it’s worked perfectly for me so I stick to it when dealing with these types of cakes.
35 minutes later I whipped the cakes out of the oven and in a moment of panic, I almost chucked both cakes in the bin thinking that they had burnt. Thankfully I saw the picture in the cookbook just before, realised they’re meant to be very dark and stopped myself just in time.
I’m not very good at icing cakes properly; I can never seem to get the cake to stand straight and the icing to look smooth. As I made two halves, I cut the top off one of the cakes (to straighten it out) and put a layer of cream cheese icing on top. The second cake went on top of this and the 15 attempts to get the icing on straight and smooth started to commence. Twenty minutes later I gave up and dusted the top with cocoa powder.
Second tip of the day; don’t put a lot of cocoa powder in the sieve and practice on an empty plate to figure out how gently you should shake it. I got a bit excited and went crazy so had to mix the cocoa powder in with the icing and try again.
At 11pm I managed to turn out a slightly wonky and definitely not smooth Guinness Chocolate cake. You have to love the homemade feel of it though. The cake got the official seal of approval at the barbeque, was loved by all and sneakily taken home by others. It was a bit too rich for myself but the cream cheese frosting complimented it nicely. Definitely one I’d tell everyone to try for the sake of saying you made a Guinness cake.
The Diary of a Bake-A-Holic 
